Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

James 1:17 CSB

Thanksgiving has passed, and, if your family is anything like mine, that means that you’re ramping up into full-on Christmas mode. Your calendar is full of concerts, services, and gatherings. You want to embrace the Christmas spirit, but you’re also aware of just how much there is to do in the next three weeks, and your to-do list doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to “ta-done”.

I get it. I really do. Food to make for gatherings. Outfits to coordinate for half a dozen services or dinners. Decorations to put up. Family members going in as many different directions as there are people in your family. Gifts to purchase and wrap (after anxiously tracking their arrival).

And that last one, friend, is the one that really gets me. I enjoy the hustle and bustle and activity of Christmas, the laughter and fellowship of gatherings and of serving one another. But oh, the gift getting. It’s been a stressor for the past several years – especially when it comes to getting gifts for our sons.

There’s only one question that gathers more silence from our boys than “What do you want for dinner?” and that’s “What do you want for your birthday and/or Christmas?”.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful that we have not raised materialistic young men. I really am. But I also want to give our sons, 18 and 23 years-old, something more personal than the gift of a portion of their college tuition or the covering of a few car payments this year. I’d like to get them something they truly WANT, but I don’t know what that is…and apparently, neither do they. Or, maybe they do know, but they also know their “toys” have gotten more expensive as they age and that having two sons in college is hard on the family budget. They are thoughtful boys, and I suspect this is the primary reason they cannot think of anything they want for Christmas.

And my desire to get them a gift they truly want has me thinking about our Heavenly Father and His ability to know exactly what we want, to see our heart’s greatest longing, and to provide perfectly what meets our every want.

And yes, I mean wants.

We so often think that God focuses only on our needs, but I’m learning that He focuses a great deal on meeting our wants. It’s just that we often don’t know what we want, or we think we know what meets our wants and when God doesn’t give us that specific thing, we believe He doesn’t care about our wants. But the truth is, God knows our wants better than we do, and He gives us good and perfect gifts to address our wants better than we can.

For the month of December, I hope you’ll join me for a series of teachings and devotions on the good and perfect gifts that God gives us. I can’t think of a better topic to share with you as we enter the CHRISTmas season, the season we celebrate the birth of God’s most precious and perfect gift to us.

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