“I will buy an iPad because I love Apple”

“I will become a call center agent after I graduate, that’s the fastest way to having a career after I graduate”

“I need to go abroad, my family needs money to live”

“I have been attending this church since I was born. Why would I try others that they say would benefit me?”

Form or goal?

In buying a gadget, the form are brands, the goal is usability.

In establishing a career, the form is your job, the goal is being able to use your unique passion in pursuing the kind of work designed for you.

In relationships and family, the form is job security, the goal is love and togetherness.

In worship, the form is a church, the goal is God

In making decisions, the forms are almost always given emphasis. But in the long run, if we focus on the goal rather than the form, it produces short term pains and long term gains.

So how should we spend the Christmas season. Let’s go back to basics. A note from LifeChurch.tv’s Facebook account:

Christmas has become, for many of us, a season of eating, shopping, hosting and spending. We run ourselves ragged in an effort to please the people around us and make everyone get along long enough for all of the holiday pictures to be taken. It’s exhausting and it’s all a bunch of focus on the things that Christmas was never meant to be. We’re not gonna take it anymore. We’re going to make this year different.

This year, (let’s go) back to the basics. This year Christmas (should) be about worship, giving, and love. Those are the things that the first Christmas was all about. When Jesus was born he was a gift from the creator. He was the symbol of God’s love for us. These two realizations caused the shepherds who first visited him to worship in awe of the wonderful miracle of the Messiah.

So as we head into the holiday, let’s conspire to change Christmas. Let’s leave behind the stress and spending and trade them in for worship, giving and love.

In the middle of this tragedy, before the week ends, another super typhoon crossed the country. And while it changes its course and has spared Metro Manila, it did create damage in Northern Luzon.

It was on its way out, when another typhoon entered and pulled it back and landed to Northern Luzon 3 times, killing hundreds more on landslides and floods.

Today, I opened my television in the morning, I saw 65% of Pangasinan under water. My mother called from Nueva Ecija, and while she comforted me by saying they are just fine, she reported that most of our town Jaen is already under flood water.

Can you imagine that a mountain city like Baguio will experience flood?

Can’t help but ask, what’s going on? What’s happening to us?

It’s a rhetorical question, don’t need to answer that. I just feel that I need to get that off my chest.

The whole gift receiving thing

Take note that I didn’t say “gift giving”, that’s for a reason. And let me tell you why our generation has screwed up the Christmas season big time because of this practice.

* What do we teach our kids and what had we learned when we were kids? Gift receiving, that’s right! We are told that if you are good, Santa — actually that’s mom and dad, sorry for the spoiler for those of you who still do not know — will give you gifts. And so the kids are excited for the gifts that they will receive. What happens when dad is fired from his job and the kid will not be receiving a gift this time around? How will you explain to a kid that Christmas is NOT about receiving gifts anyway?

* Exchange gifts happen during Christmas parties. We have “quotas” for the gift price, right? Come to think of it, the focus is the kind of gift that someone will receive. It has to be within the range.

* And yes, families, friends and loved ones, we all give gifts to one another this season. But this is what I have noticed during the gift buying process (does not apply to all, but this is a general observation) 1) we only give gifts to those who we consciously or unconsciously believe we will receive gifts from, and 2) we are so conscious about the price of the gift, thinking that if the receiving person notices that gift is cheap, s/he might be offended. On both cases, the focus is receiving.

Cliche as it is, Christmas is not about receiving, rather it’s about giving. The reason why we celebrate Christmas is because of the “Christ” who was sent as a gift of God to man. “For God so loved the world that he gave…”

The traditions and peripherals

If you still have not noticed, Christmas has become all about snow flakes, Rudolf the red nose reindeer, Santa, Jingle bells, Frosty the snow man and a whole lot of stuff and characters

Not that these things and traditions are bad, but I just don’t get the connection between these things and the “real reason for the season”.

The most disappointing fact is that there are actually a lot of people who don’t want to equate the season to Christ anymore. This is very apparent in western countries, at least in the US as I know — the seat of post-modern thinking. They even refuse to greet “Merry Christmas” and instead use “Happy Holidays”. Have you noticed this in movies and marketing materials on TV and print ads? When they say “Happy Holidays”, they mean, I don’t care about the reason why you celebrate Christmas because I have my reasons, but don’t “force me into this Christ thing”.

Sigh…

We lost the meaning of Christmas, really.

The gifts, the parties, the tree, the lights — all these are meaningless if the center of the season isn’t Christ-mas.

My ideal Christmas season

While the following ideas are almost impossible to happen in this commercialized, post-modern “it’s all about me” generation, let me just end this short series by how the story of the grinch ended — a happy one.

I’m dreaming — not of a “white Christmas” — but a Christmas season where:

1. The focus is Jesus.

Stripped down, simple yet celebrative and contemplative. Everything is focused on what happened on that night in Bethlehem.

We thought that Easter is the most important aspect of our Christianity since it is the season where we commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus. I will argue that it’s not. God’s sacrifice started on Christmas day when Jesus decided to become a creature even if he is the creator.

My all time favorite illustration to show this fact is to say that it would be humiliating for human beings like us to become ants. That, impossible as it may seem to happen, is only a transformation of a higher form of creature to a lower form of creature. What Jesus did is different and more humiliating than we can ever imagine. He was the creator who became a creature. Everything is done on Christmas day so we can have Easter — when Jesus would die for your sins and my sins so that upon having a relationship with him and accepting him as Lord and Savior of our life, we can live with him forever.

I believe that the reason why for most, Christmas is about everything else other than Jesus is because of lack of relationship with him. The Christmas season could have been the best time of the year to remember that.

2. We actually give without thinking of receiving

Gift giving in it real essence is just emulating what God did. “For God so loved the world that he gave…” (John 3:16a)

What if we give gifts without thinking of what we can receive? What if, instead of giving well-wrapped gifts to your office mates, friends and relatives, we spend everything that we normally spend during Christmas season to buy food and clothing for the poor — people that doesn’t have any capability whatsoever to give a gift in return?

God is the model of this. When he gave Jesus to us, he wasn’t expecting anything in return. The Bible said, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. In the book of Isaiah, it is said that our most sincere attempt to do good is as filthy as a rug in the eyes of God. Why? Because we are all sinners and God is holy, holy, holy. How then can God expect anything from us?

That’s why when Jesus came on Christmas eve as a gift from God, He is not thinking of anything in return. He did it because he love us. He did it because there’s no other way than Jesus. He did it because he is our only chance.

How will you respond to his love?

This Christmas, my prayer is for us to go back to it’s origin — the very reason for this act of grace by God, and sincerely search our hearts and answer that simple yet profound question.

When God instituted marriage at creation, he said that it is not good for man to be alone. He created the woman to partner with the man.

In your spiritual life, God designed it that everyone should be part of a spiritual family called the local church. If you’re just a church goer and not really living life with your church family, you’re missing a lot!

In business, I’m learning these days that partnerships should not be disregarded. The reality is, we don’t know it all, and we can’t do it all. A project may need multiple technologies, and we can only offer one. The best solution is to partner with another company — which we formerly consider as a competitor — and, instead of compete, we cooperate.

Bottom line: the cliche “No man is an island” rings loud and clear on me these days. It’s humbling to understand that we’re not perfect, we don’t know everything, and we need each other to compliment each other’s weaknesses.

* Guitarchic has Pinkseo. GannsDeen has Superblessed. The relunctant leader has the accidental missionary. I always wondered why popular bloggers have to maintain two blogs at the same time. Until a word came out, I forgot from whom, from Yuga, I guess — niche. I’ve been learning this from leadership books and forgot to apply in my blog. Life 2.0, being a “personal” blog is chapsuey. It has everything in it — personal life, theology, technology, work related posts. I am trying to win everyone, I’m winning no one :D Anyway, I’ll make this as some kind of experiment. I’m going to divide my blog into two. I’m activating my multiply.com blog and name it “it’s.not.about.me“. While the title said it, it’s actually going to be about some personal stuff. Call it mushy, light, mind dumps. Life 2.0, this blog, on the other hand will contain some hard, call it impersonal stuff. Politics, current events, theology, technology. See if it works out. I’m going to cross link the two blogs to reference those who are interested of the other.

* I’m so loving jQuery. In my opinion, if maximized, it can be a great tool for programmer-designer collaboration.

* Happyslip is releasing a DVD? Man, YouTube superstars are really getting a career out of their videos!