Remember …” (Ps 105:5).

How well did you remember the Christ of Christmas throughout the holiday season? I did quite well… until the day of the great cheesecake challenge, day before Christmas!

In one half-day I lost my focus. I let a stupid (confusing!) cheesecake recipe rob me of it! What I learned from that experience was:

1) Don’t plan any over-ambitious endeavor for a day bound to be overloaded, even if you think yourself otherwise well prepared.

2) Count the cost before you build the tower or wage the war (Lk 14:28-32). (In this case that meant read the recipe thoroughly before even planning on embarking.)

3) Realize you can still shelve earthly plans, even those you’d set your face set like flint to accomplish.

4) Keep Christmas as simple as possible without becoming a Scrooge. And…

5) Make remembering Christ the Number One priority, with all humanly contrived frills and thrills subservient to that—everyday.

I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted on Christmas Eve Day over this foolishness, what with phone calls for helpful instruction and all. And the futility of all that angst and effort came home especially by 10 PM on Christmas Day when no one had yet tasted the thing. With all those other goodies, who needed a cheesecake, no matter how fabulous?

Now about to embark on a new calendar year, I don’t want to goof up again the same way, setting my sights on over-ambitious self-improvement campaigns, with too many facets and complications, on grandiose plans that are mine, but not God’s.  Let me follow instead the simple yet sensible instructions of Psalm 105:1-5, and watch the rest of my new year’s endeavors fall into place, and then move forward by His good Spirit in His good time.