It was a good Christmas at the Post house.  My kids have outgrown Santa, so I don’t sneak around like I used to, but I do have a few holiday secrets each year.  This year I was caught in the middle of one of them.  My 10 year old was inspecting gifts one day and started comparing the handwriting on them.  After looking at one for “Mom” for awhile, she blurted out at me: “Do you wrap your own gifts?”  I try to ignore the question and distract her, but she finally says, “You do don’t you?  You wrap your own gifts. That’s pathetic.  Wait!  Do you stuff your own stocking too?”

Here’s the thing.  I’m married to a non-gift-giving kind of guy.  It’s not his thing.  It never has been and I’m ok with that.  But small children are NOT ok with Mommy not having presents on Christmas morning.  They think Santa screwed up big time and that is hard to explain to a 3 year old.  It only had to happen to me once (about 12-13 years ago) and ever since then Mommy has had gifts under the tree on Christmas morning.  The dirty little secret was that Mommy put them there herself.

So the secret was out this year and all the kids are old enough to realize what has been going on.  They were appalled.  My 10 year old said she would NEVER wrap her own gifts.  I told her that when a mom looks into the face of an upset toddler, there is no end to the things she would do or the lengths she would go to do them.  Trust me on this one girlie, you will shock yourself one day if God lets you be a Mommy.

Christmas morning rolls around and my girl must have rallied the troops.  It became her personal mission that I never have to wrap my own gifts again.  I received more gifts this Christmas than any other Christmas in the whole of my life before.  Homemade gifts and bought gifts with allowance money.  It was humbling.

As ridiculous as wrapping my own gifts may sound, I’ll never feel bad for all the years of doing it because I did it with a good heart for my kids sake.  Looks like that gig is over.  But it did get me to thinking.  I have always wrapped my own gifts because there was nobody else to do it.  How about life though?  How often do we try to scheme and plan and adjust things so that everything will look right (even though it really isn’t right)?  Especially if you feel responsible for people, you’ll attempt to move heaven and earth sometimes just to try to fix things that aren’t your job to fix.  It’s like wrapping your own gift.  You shouldn’t be doing it!

So why do we do it?  I wrapped my own gifts because nobody else was there to do it.  But life isn’t like that if we belong to Christ.  We do have someone looking out for us.  Someone who can make things right…REALLY right.  We have someone who wants to and will work on our behalf.  We have someone in our corner.  We don’t have to do it ourselves.  We can just leave His job to Him.  Jesus Christ made it his personal mission to save us from our sins and send His Spirit to be our comforter, friend, helper and guide so that we never, ever have to do things on our own.

He is the gift.  And there’s no box big enough for Him.  He is the master of the universe, so we can stop trying to be.

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