If Jesus would remain a baby, I would find Christmas shopping much easier. But every time I venture out to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, by purchasing a gift for someone I love, I am stumped. I do not know what kind of gift to buy that will somehow declare the birth of the Son of God. I do not have the where-with-all for a gift that marks the birth of a King. Besides, every time I begin to shop in honor of Baby Jesus, I see him whipped unmercifully upon a cross. Nothing so confuses my shopping at Christmas than the sight of blood spilling from his side and, although I resist the thought, it will not go away.

Before I can do much looking around the malls, Jesus jumps out of the crib, fully adult, onto the streets in front of me and I can hardly keep up with him. He’s healing people and getting into all kinds of trouble with medical experts. I am lost about what to do. Besides, any free moment he goes to the wrong places. He goes to the seedy parts of town. He goes to places I have never been before. He mixes with rejected people. He goes to City Hall and hurls insults at those in leadership who are without mercy.

Downtown, he is outspoken and scathing to those who are unfair in their business practices no matter who they are or what positions they hold. Jesus detests double standards and addresses them at every encounter.

I want to shove him back in the crib where he was safe. I want him back in the crib where we were all safer. Then, just when I thought he would stop in at a church or two – perhaps a cathedral built in his honor – he’s off into a bar befriending losers. He’s talking politics in a way I have never heard. He’s talking about fairness and justice and mercy and truth. I want to tell him not to mix politics and religion but I hold my tongue and blush with the absurdity of it all.

If he would just stay in one place like a baby should is all I can think.

It’s not long before he gains in popularity and I am in a jostle with the crowds for his attention. But it’s not the kind of popularity I was expecting. I will never be able to get a gift at this rate. Prostitutes love him. Drunks run to his defense. The poorest of the poor are out in their masses. He dances in the streets with children and people he has only just met. Young men and women with piercings all over their bodies form a circle with him, and they celebrate like long lost friends, reunited. Then, instead of heeding the city ordinances and honoring the local businesses, he feeds the entire crowd by some miraculous display.

Now what do I buy? Clearly, anything I spend on any gift, if I am really out to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child has to be grand. Yet it has to be modest. His birth couldn’t have been more modest: a shed was the delivery room, an animal feeding trough, the crib. Secrecy, shame and danger were the backdrop of this dramatic night while poverty dictated the details. So I cannot spend much. Yet it was the greatest night the earth had ever seen. It was the greatest moment in all history. It was the night angels sighed! It was the night the hosts of heaven longed to witness; the night the order of everything was disturbed forever by Love’s intervention.

I try to tell him he’s ruining things: that he is too quick to befriend the wrong people. Clearly his mind is elsewhere. I plead with him to befriend the religious and civic leaders but he will not listen. Soon, as if to prove me right, they are up in arms against him. Everybody who is anybody wants him gone. They call him a hindrance to tourism, a threat to peace and they accuse him of not attending church!

Next, he’s looking crucifixion in the eye.

If only he would remain a baby.

It is so much easier to shop for a baby.

“I’m ready to leave my partner. I’ve finally realized he is emotionally abusive. We have been together for 5 years. He’s never cheated but he withholds love, affection and then when I eventually get angry about it, he says that that’s the reason he wants to leave. I realize I am fighting for something that he doesn’t value. He is arrogant. He mocks me, he’s condescending and is as sweet as pie around his mates but behind closed doors can be nasty, petty, selfish, stingy, dismissive, vindictive, rude, and evil spirited. He is attractive, charismatic, and ambitious. I’ve been reluctant to leave because I felt bad for him. I always made excuses for his rude, childlike, behavior because I told myself that he didn’t realize that he was behaving so cruelly. I even told myself that he could not count on his parents so I would be the one to show him what real love feels like. I always wondered if he’d finally love me the way I love him?” (Edited)

You have “seen the light” after five and not 40 years. Congratulations. Leave carefully. Such people hate to lose and will go to enormous extremes to appear to win.

1. Tell people what you want or they will impose an agenda upon you.
2. If you address issues when they are first apparent to you it is more likely they will be resolved or at least addressed.
3. Big problems almost always begin as really small, usually negligible irritations.
4. What you will not, or cannot talk about is usually has more power to drive you than the things you are able to talk about.
5. There’s a natural urge to tell people what they want to hear – an effective, highly functioning person develops the courage to deliver seemingly unpopular messages in palatable ways.
6. What people think is more important than the reality – the individual who takes it upon him or herself to be a denial-buster will not hold much credibility for very long.
7. All behavior has meaning but not all the meaning behind is accessible or important – wisdom is knowing the difference.

1. Don’t take sides when faced with a conflict that does not involve you.
2. Don’t gossip or pass on information that is none of your business.
3. Don’t use the Internet for personal reasons while you are at work.
4. Don’t talk out of both sides of your mouth.
5. Ask for clarity (instructions, guidelines) when you face new tasks.
6. Ask for feedback regarding how you are performing and for constructive criticism.
7. Ask about company culture if you are not sure what’s appropriate in any setting.
8. Ask about the history of the company and what are its long-term aspirations.
9. Return calls.
10. Leave succinct and accurate messages.
11. Say “thank you” more than you say anything else.
12. Solve problems, not people.

“In three years my wife and I have found it difficult to speak of the loss of our unborn child. This hit me very severely and all I want to say is that people usually brush this sort of thing off as if men don’t feel it as much, and as if it is somehow a good thing to miscarry. The last thing I wanted to hear was ‘you can try again’ or “these things happen for a reason’ or ‘it’s for the best’ or ‘God knows what He’s doing’. It is not that I want everyone to understand or to feel the pain like I do but I do suggest people rather withhold their editorial opinion when expressing their sympathy.” (Edited)

Thanks for drawing attention to the pain fathers also feel. Thanks for helping us all become wiser when faced with these difficult matters.

Looking and longing for a more “authentic” Christmas? Do you want to return to its real meaning, identify with Jesus more than you see done in the surrounding culture?

I have a few suggestions to facilitate your desire. Granted, this is not easy as we do not live in a territory occupied by a foreign power whose representative despises locals and is especially violent toward infant boys after getting wind that one will be born who will be greater than he is.

In your journey to be “in touch” with the birth of the Christ-child, start by walking to say, Chicago, Cleveland, or Cincinnati. Take a donkey (or ride a camel) to St Louis. Wherever you choose to go, plan to arrive by Christmas Eve. Have at least one very pregnant teen-ager (a non-relative) of about 13 or 14 in your party.

The ride, the discomfort, the lack of certainty about accommodations and the welfare of mother and baby along the way will enhance your appreciation of the season and sharpen your perceptions of how ridiculously off-target are our current traditions with sterile stables, plastic donkeys, unbounded shopping and a world hung with mistletoe.

Take no money. Be prepared to be turned away by family and motel managers alike. You are accompanied by a pregnant, delusional teen who, apart from being no one’s wife, claims “innocence” regarding the pregnancy. Her claim that an angel said she’d conceive a child by God more than alienates your party from usual societal pleasantries, and you end up with a makeshift accommodation between two dumpsters at the rear of a very cheap rent-by-the-hour motel.

On the journey, chat here and there about the political leader who slaughters all the boys in the Midwest. He has spurts of uncontrolled power and an inordinate degree of submission from the troops who carry out his wishes. Remind yourself that for weeks, months and years to come, parents will mourn endlessly over the loss of their infant boys.

You get to successfully hide your infant from the brutal eye of the murderous leader, but this is little consolation, for although you are very grateful that the baby will not be murdered as an infant, you can hardly dispel the knowledge that he will, nonetheless, be ruthlessly murdered as an adult.

As you choose a parking lot behind a motel in South Bend or Toledo, reflect on the oddness of the child’s conception and the rumor you hear that he will “save” people from their sins. This thought both encourages and disturbs you. You literally fall to the ground and worship a God who has given such a privilege while remaining aware of how those who seek no salvation usually treat self-proclaimed saviors.

The cattle are lowing, yes, but have you ever spent the night with an ox? Have you noticed how much distance you keep from the animals at the state fair? There’s good reason for that. Somehow the lowly manger has become a sanitized, cozy corner. Live in a dumpster, add a few stray farm animals and let a few wild goats, dogs and rats enter regularly from stage left and stage right, and you are more likely to create something of the environment of the first Christmas.

Let there be no gifts, no tree, no glitter. Christmas earmarks the beginning of the second phase of a remarkably courageous journey of love, adventure and commitment on behalf of a determined God. The gift is in the risk. The value is in the danger. The generosity is within the sheer lunacy that God constantly loves a recalcitrant humanity.

The UPS truck arriving at your door with a gift from Aunt Joan in Ohio does nothing to reflect the spirit of generosity that was evident with the coming of the Christ-child unless Aunt Joan has given everything she ever owned or valued, and, at the cost of her life, packed it off to you for Christmas.

I get a little peeved when cartoons portray a passive therapist repeating how do you feel? as if feelings are the cornerstone of effective therapy. In decades of therapeutic encounters how do you feel?may be the question I have asked least.

Feelings are deceptive. Fleeting. Feelings offer a poor guide to healthy action and often trap clients in inaction.

Thinking is what makes the difference. I am far more interested in what my clients THINK than I am in what clients FEEL. Of course I acknowledge the importance of feelings, but I am careful to avoid elevating feelings so they trump thinking.

I believe people think their way into a new and helpful ways of behaving.

The head (thinking) is a far more-trustworthy leader than the heart.

I have seen many a client think (read, plan, plot, negotiate, strategize) his or her way out of an overwhelming personal dilemma while he or she was, at the same time, FEELING overwhelmed, debilitated, incapable of doing anything.

Getting your head into gear can pull your entire life into a whole new realm of helpful, good feelings, which of course, as I said, are not to be overly trusted.