A God Who is Hard to Shop For
- December 01, 2011
What gift do you give a God who has everything? No doubt about it, God is hard to shop for at Christmas time. Maybe that’s why he gets overlooked on many a list.
First of all, God doesn’t need anything. There isn’t anything he’s run out of, or hasn’t seen in the stores, or would be surprised by. And if God has a wish list, you and I haven’t seen it.
Or have we? Sometimes the gifts people give provide a clue to what they would like to receive. After all, it was God who gave the first Christmas gift, two thousand years ago. He wrapped his divine son in flesh and blood like ours and gave him to all of us.
And God gave us the gift of Jesus Christ forever. If there was ever a
“gift that keeps on giving” it certainly is our Savior. So many other precious gifts come from the Gift: our Catholic faith and Church; our share in God’s life in Baptism; our spiritual food from heaven in Eucharist; the forgiveness of our sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation; eternal life with the Father and the Son and the Spirit.
God gave his Son as saving gift for all, and men hung him on a tree – not a Christmas tree but a cross. Then his Father raised him from the dead so that all could have life in Christ’s name and power.
Surely, God’s gift to us at Christmas provides the best hint about what to give him in return. In giving Jesus God gave us himself, and that is what God wants us to give him – ourselves. Your self is the only gift God will not have if you do not give it to him.
St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, grasped this truth very
well. His famous prayer expressed the gift of self to God perfectly: “Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will – all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it. All is yours, dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is sufficient for me.”
How should we wrap the gift of self to God at Christmas? It probably doesn’t matter much, though it certainly is important to let God keep the gift permanently, and to let him do with it what he wants, according to his loving will.
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