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Welcome back to the Be The Light Challenge! If you’re just getting started or catching up, you can find all of the elements of this 15 Day Challenge here, so be sure to check out past day’s challenges if you haven’t already.
It’s Day 7, and for today and tomorrow we’re going to be thinking about gifts! But for today, your Challenge is an internally-focused one, which will ask you to spend some time contemplating gifts.
Of course, there is probably no day of the year we more closely associate with gifts than Christmas. While gifts shouldn’t be the primary focus of Christmas, they can be an awesome way to express love, care and affection for others.
What makes a great gift to you? Do you love gifts that are thoughtful and tell you that the person giving it to you really knows you and has thought about you? Or do you like gifts that are a complete surprise, something you’d never have dreamed of receiving?
Gifts are a great opportunity to change and grow your relationship with someone you care about. A gift can speak volumes about what lies in your heart and the love you want to show the people in your life. A thoughtful gift is a tangible expression of what you think and feel – a reminder to them that they can hold onto or remember moving forward.
But even more importantly than anything you could ever give or receive from another person – at Christmas we celebrate the most amazing gift that God continues to offer each of us – the blessing of His presence with us and the salvation Christ offers through Himself. There is no more powerful of a gift, nothing can change us more, and nothing lasts for eternity like our relationship with God.
So at Christmas, we have the opportunity to reflect, remember, and celebrate the enormous gift of God with us – and we can even do this with our gift-giving.
There are so many ways that we can share the light of Christ through gift giving, from choosing a gift to help someone out with an important issue or problem, to giving a gift that demonstrates how much you love and care.
But regardless of the gift you choose, whether it’s store-bought or homemade, hand-picked or a gift card, expensive or no-cost at all – you can always pray over the gift and invite God into the gift giving process.
Your Day 7 Challenge today is to pray over the Christmas gifts you’ll be giving this year.
You can complete this Challenge by praying over all of the gifts (whether you physically have them or not), or singling out one gift in particular that you believe will be meaningful and important to that person.
If you have the gift with you, go grab it for your prayer. If you don’t have it with you, try to find a representation of it. For example, pull up your Amazon orders, if you’re sending gifts to family you won’t be seeing, and pray over that! Or if you can’t have a physical connection to the gift at all – that’s ok too! The point of prayer is to bring ourselves to God and meet Him where He is always at – right here with us.
As you pray, here are some ideas for what to include in your prayer over the gift.
- Pray that the gift brings joy, hope, or fulfills a need for that person.
- Pray that your relationship with them will grow or be changed as a result of this gift.
- Pray that the gift has unexpected meaning or significance for them.
- Pray that the light of Christ shines through your giving of this gift.
- Pray for the recipient and their circumstances.
- Ask God to show you further ways to support and love them, now and in the future.
The possibilities for prayer over gifts are endless! The most important thing is to be intentional, genuinely invite God into the gift-giving process, and ask Him to be reflected and glorified in the love and light you are sharing through the gift.
Ready to get started? I hope your Day 7 Challenge to pray over the gifts you’re giving this year is meaningful and helps you see all of the shopping you’ve been doing in a new light. Additionally, this challenge will prepare you for the Day 8 Challenge tomorrow, which is also centered around gifts, so be sure to keep that in mind as you complete today’s Challenge.