“Either way, Christ’s love controls us. Since we believe that Christ died for all, we also believe that we have all died to our old life.”

There is plenty to be thinking about during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season.  Actually, way too much to think about and I am pretty sure that sometime between now and Christmas we will say to someone else, or to ourselves something like, “I wish we could take all the commercial out of Christmas!”.  And then, on top of it all we read of the warnings of travel strains to come.  American Airlines had a glitch in their vacation scheduling software and ended up allowing too many pilots to take time off during their busiest travel time of the year.  It made the news and it made us (we travel on AA) stop and think about whether or not we will be faced with even more stress as we fly to multiple cities this Christmas.  When events like what happened at American occur, it makes consumers wonder who really has their hand on the controls?  Data breaches, software glitches, product recalls, etc. all erode consumer trust and confidence.  What if in 2018 your company or organization recommitted itself to a year without mistakes that the consumer or customer could see or feel?  It might be impossible to achieve the goal, but setting the goal itself, might be a big improvement in keeping the right hands on the controls.

Between now and when our Christmas “time-off” will begin, we can expect that we will feel lots of pressure to get everything done before the end of the year.  We will feel the stresses mentioned above in getting ready for the Christmas gift exchange.  There undoubtedly will be bad news in the press about something out of our control. And, for some of us, we will lose something this holiday season that will hurt enough that the potential joy of the season will be too distant to realize. We might even be heading into the holidays already feeling out of control. This is when we need to remember that we have Christ with His hands on our controls.  There has never been, and never will be a shortage of Him to pilot our lives.  As Paul reminds us, it is Christ’s love that controls us.  We just need to relinquish command of the controls to Him.

Reference: 2 Corinthians 5:14 (New Living Translation)