Once a year, when the kids were growing up, I would go in their room on a Saturday morning, and break it to them, as enthusiastically as I could, “Today is Christmas card picture day!” I’ll never forget the year my daughter Emerson, too asleep to censor, pulled the pillow over her little head cried out, “The WORST day of the year!”

Multiple children were never meant to be lined up in their Sunday best to produce picture-perfect smiles, all in the very same instant. But that’s what the Christmas card exercise demands.

Over the years, I transformed each of our old Christmas card photos into an ornament for the tree. I imagined we would all marvel at how everyone had grown and how we would almost certainly lapse into sweet nostalgia…maybe over some steaming hot cocoa with Christmas music playing in the background and snow falling gently outside. Well, we do marvel and reminisce each year, but it sounds more like…”Oh! That’s the year Mom made us all cry,” and “Remember how hot it was that day?” or “I can’t believe we were so close to the edge of the roof…” and the inevitable, “That was right before the wave crashed over the rocks.” In trying to create perfection, the only memories that have survived are the real ones. The heat, discomfort, tension and mayhem, of trying to get everything JUST SO. So now, every year, I endure quite a different tradition, as I get to hear the horror stories of each picture-perfect photo that emerges from the “special ornaments” container.

The fact is, at this point, I would rather have the real ones. The ones that never made it off the cutting room floor. The ones with the girls looking at everything but the camera or the series in which the dog photo-bombed six shots in a row while the girls fell over themselves laughing, or the hundreds of photos with arms across faces, eyes closed and heads turned. Happy, messy, giggling clumps of children, not the perfect ones who had just wiped the tears from their cheeks.

I try, so hard, to clean up for life – – when the real, actual life I am living is the one to embrace.

So many seasons of my life have been defined by sacrificing the peace of the moment to try and create something wonderful rather than creating an atmosphere that feels wonderful because it is informed by fun and love, grace and whimsy…because it is informed by the Spirit of God rather than my own personal agenda, no matter how noble or “necessary.” I have to decide what is more important, getting it “right” according to my own standard or doing it in the spirit God intended. It’s a choice.

Every time I try and get that perfect picture at the expense of the experience….It’s like I am in the wrong ball park COMPLETELY. I am shooting for the “WHAT,” when I should be shooting for the “HOW.” Shooting for the “What” is about me. Shooting for the “How” is about God.

If I am brutally honest, I give myself plenty of credit for all the things I accomplish on behalf of those around me, but I tend to give myself multiple passes at how I accomplish those things. What a humbling and punch-to-the-gut awakening to discover I have been focusing on the wrong thing all along.

I can shoot for the “What” for the rest of my life and get it pretty much right, because I have the capacity to be a pretty hard-driving, type-A. But that will never get me what I truly want….great relationships, kids who want to bring their families home to visit one day, a marriage based on enduring friendship, a rich, shared history with those I love, and an overwhelming sense of peace and ease and joy….

It is usually at this point in my thinking I start to despair because I feel like I have messed everything up. But I have to listen to God in these moments because no matter how I feel, I HAVEN’T messed anything up yet! I don’t have the power to mess everything up. I am actually not that important or powerful (although I forget that too). How is it possible that it always dawns on me afresh that God is SUPERNATURAL, with a capital everything. That He has the power to restore and redeem….that He IS restoring my life and redeeming my relationships, all the time as I seek to know Him more. That He is living and working in my life every day, tinkering, changing things, fixing what I have broken and infusing everything with love.

His work is a constant Divine regeneration of my life and the relationships in it. God is rooting for me, cheering me on to dive into the commotion of what’s actually beyond the lens. Every moment He is asking me to take a deep breath and try it differently this time, His way, not mine. He is daring me to take an imperfect picture, and have a ball doing it. He is inviting me into the happy mayhem of a life of faith.

Merry Christmas.