This Is a Great Time to Get Reconnected

Now that the Thanksgiving holiday is past, my wife and I have started watching a few Christmas movies, especially the newer ones offered up on the Hallmark Channel. There is often a common scenario in many of those rather predictable storylines, whether it’s in their Christmas movies or in their other romantic flicks shown throughout the year. It usually involves two people who were once in a relationship but had gone different ways, coming back together years later. They may have to work through some issues related to their previous break-up – there may need to be some confession, forgiveness, and change of heart – but eventually they end up reconnecting and their relationship being restored, maybe even stronger and on a more permanent basis than it had been before.

 The holiday season is a wonderful time to reconnect with people. We may have opportunities to spend time with distant relatives we only see once a year. Or we might send a Christmas card to folks we haven’t heard from in a while or haven’t seen face-to-face in decades. Maybe we’ll even include a little note updating others on what has been going on in our family over the past year. In some cases, the holidays are our main opportunity to reconnect with folks from whom we’ve been separated by distance, busyness, or issues which have strained our relationship.

This is also a great time to reconnect with the Lord. If we’ve allowed issues to get between us and our relationship with God, there’s no better time than the present to deal with them. Maybe something happened in our lives that made us question God’s love for us, His ability to answer prayer, or even His existence. We walked away from Him and our faith. However, we recognize that something important is missing in our lives. Nothing else has been able to fill that void or satisfy the deepest yearnings in our hearts. It’s time to humbly seek God again, to honestly look to Him and His Word for the truth about those issues, and to put our trust in Him.

Maybe others of us haven’t made such a drastic break in our relationship with the Lord, yet we’ve definitely put some distance between us and Him. We’ve delved into activities that we knew He wouldn’t approve of. We’ve given our love to the things of this world rather than to Him and what He considers important. We’ve fallen into old ways of living and sinful habits that we once left behind. It’s time for us prodigals to go back home to our Father, confess our wrongdoings, and trust that He will lovingly welcome us back home.

Then there are others of us who have simply grown complacent in our relationship with the Lord. We haven’t lost our faith or fallen into some sinful lifestyle, but we aren’t actively pursuing a closer walk with Him. We’ve allowed our love for Him to wain and grow cold. We haven’t turned away from the Lord, but we just aren’t seeking to know Him and fellowship with Him as earnestly as we’ve done in the past. We, too, need to reconnect with our God and Savior.  

So as we go through this season of the year, let’s use it as an opportunity to reach out to the God who is always lovingly reaching out to us. He is ready and wants to reconnect with us, if we’ll just take a step toward Him. James 4:18 promises that if we will draw near to God, He will draw near to us. Give it a try. Make this a special season for reconnecting not only with other people, but also with the Lord.