Keep Christ in our Christmas List

It’s a busy world out there. We all have a long list of things that we need to get done every week and we often have trouble finding time to accomplish everything on our list. Task management needs to be used in order to prioritize accomplishing the most important tasks. My tasks usually are broken down between the following three categories: things I need to do, things I should do, and things I want to do. The need that should be at the top of everyone’s list is getting to Heaven and if we want to be successful, the arrangement of our to do list should reflect that.

In the Advent season, we look forward with great anticipation to experiencing Christmas. If you have any young children, you’ll know what great anticipation looks like. This is the kind of excitement we should all have when we look forward to getting to Heaven. Stepping foot in Heaven will be more joyous than any childhood Christmas morning. God is the ultimate giver of gifts and He wants to shower us with good things.

In order to achieve the goal of being with our Father in Heaven, we need to stay awake and constantly work on the relationship we have with Him. It’s easy to accomplish the list of things that we want to do, but it often takes more effort to accomplish the other two lists that include the things we need to do and the things we should do. We need to have a relationship with God. We need to go to Mass for the Sunday liturgy and on holy days of obligation. We need to avoid mortal sins and go to confession when we commit them. We should pray and go to Mass as often as possible. We should be knowledgeable about our faith.

What do we fill our lists with? Is it mostly a list of wants or is it necessities. We don’t want to get into the situation where we complete all of our wants and are happy in this life, but run out of time to accomplish the things we need to do to get to Heaven. Although, it’s fine to put wants on our list, we need to prioritize the needs. God wants us to be happy in this life and do what we want to do. He gave us free will after all. However, we can’t let our wants dominate our life. If the wants in our life crowd out the needs we are like the good seed getting choked by the vines.

Task and time management is tricky when we don’t know how much time we have. Our life could end at any moment and so we need to always be prepared. I fall into procrastination many times, but when I find myself losing ground, I try to crank it into high gear and get back where I need to be. We live in a time where it’s very easy to get lead down many different paths in search of pleasure and pulled in many different directions to live up to a standard others have for us. However, when we walk through life following the light of Christ, we will find our way to eternal happiness.