Decorate Your Heart with Joy This Holiday Season

Published by helloredds@gmail.com on 12/19/202412/19/2024

Decorate Your Heart with Joy This Holiday Season

The Thanksgiving decorations in the shed were staring me down.

Bins full of pumpkins, pilgrims, and fall foliage.

The argument inside my mind ensued.

I don’t have to decorate for Thanksgiving this year.

Maybe I’ll skip Thanksgiving and decorate for Christmas.

The kids will be disappointed, though. Maybe they won’t notice. Come on, you know they will see. I do have all these beautiful decorations I received after Marty died.

That First Year

I can understand why I didn’t decorate the first year after her death.

It was too sad to go through her things. But now I’m just being lazy. The truth is, I just don’t want to do the work. The truth is I’m not ready for the Christmas rush. And, the truth is I feel like the Grinch and the holidays haven’t even started. 

The disappointed reactions of my children replayed before me like a movie.

And I knew it was time to fight the green, self-absorbed sin inside of me that lost its joy even before the season began.

Have You Ever Lost Your Joy?

When you don’t feel like celebrating, how can you turn your attitude around to make much of Jesus and less of yourself?

Pray for a clean heart.

When we feel passionless inside we can pray for the Lord to help our attitude to glorify Him.

Psalm 51:10

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy spirit from me.

One thing was certain.

Of this I am certain… I needed a clean heart.

Truly, I needed God to renew my spirit and allow the Holy Spirit to live through me.

As I prayed, I felt God’s grace towards me. And I knew it wasn’t necessarily about the decorations. It was all about my heart.

I began to sing Psalm 51:10 and confessed my bad attitude. The freedom of God’s forgiveness immediately began to renew my spirit.

As you take down your decorations and prepare to make room for the new season, clean out those dusty places in your heart. Make room for Christ to dwell in your heart peacefully during the busy days to come.

Pray for your joy to be restored.d

“Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.” (Psalm 51)

That’s why we celebrate Christmas!

But all too often, and especially during the holidays, stress blinds us from the true meaning behind what we do. So pray for the Lord to renew the joy of your salvation.

John 10:10 says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Unto us, a savior has been born! He came so that we may have a life! Not a joyless, busy, stressful, overwhelming life, but an abundant life. A life to the full.

Christians should be the most joyful people on earth because we have the gift of salvation! Share on X

Don’t let the commercialism of the holidays steal your gift

Sometimes the thief that comes to steal the joy out of our salvation is the commercialism that surrounds the holidays. We can let the traditions we want to keep with our family cause stress.

A few years ago my husband was excited to start the “Elf on the Shelf” tradition. But I forgot to hide “Fletcher” the very first night!

So, we took the kids out of school so we could go to the mountains to cut down our trees. The next week our tree was completely dead and brown.

We ended up buying another tree at Home Depot. When my husband went to put the lights on our second tree, the lights sparked and shorted out. These stressful moments often become our favorite memories that we laugh about for years to come.

Another Way to Decorate Your Heart with Joy This Holiday Season

Another way to keep things less stressful is to remember that you don’t have to keep up with everything.

• You don’t have to send Christmas cards.
• You don’t have to find the perfect tree and cut it down in the mountains. Or argue with your husband about what tree YOU want, ahem.
• And, you don’t have to get ALL the decorations out.
• You don’t have to get the perfect Christmas card picture where all the kids are smiling.

What’s most important is that you keep your heart in a place that can celebrate the gift of Jesus – the gift of your salvation.

Ephesians 2:8

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.

Rejoice

I love the sheer joy and anticipation children have for the holidays.

My youngest began singing, “We wish you a Merry Christmas” in October.

Also, my kids couldn’t wait to help me decorate. Every day on the way home from school my 5-year-old asked, “Can we put the decorations up today?” My 12-year-old playfully snarked, “Why is it that all the holidays have to be at the end of the month?”

Their excitement is infectious. And so is mine.

This season I want to show my children that salvation is worth celebrating. Share on X

Embrace the Joy

I’m glad I was able to embrace that joy and have fun decorating with my kids. We put praise music on and went to town unwrapping pumpkins, turkeys, and pilgrims.

Sometimes just getting started is enough to get you in the mood to decorate when you don’t feel like it. Give your children some unbreakable decorations and let them decide where to put them.

Whatever you decide to do, whether it’s winning the city light decorating contest or not putting any lights out at all this year, what matters is what’s in your heart—that your heart is clean.

Philippians 4:4 – “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!”

About the Author – Valerie Murray:

Hello! I’m Valerie, a busy mother of four energetic children and a wife to my husband of nineteen years.

I write about learning to grow closer to God and family through the daily struggles of life.

My mission is to bring hope and encouragement to struggling marriages, overwhelmed moms, and people striving to face their fears and know their worth.

Connect with Valerie here.

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Decorate Your Heart with Joy This Holiday Season