What is your grown up Christmas list?

I speak about business and do training on a regular basis facing highly paid business executives and their direct reports covering cold, hard facts on leadership, economics, behavior and all that stuff. But deep inside me lies a lesser-known person that only the Ilocana knows too well. That when left vulnerable, relaxed, and alone, not constantly battling with ideas and putting them into lessons and words, I am a hopeful romantic.

There’s just something about the melody that touches my heart and the lyrics make my heart jump a few beats faster when the piped-in music in shopping malls begin to play: “Chestnuts roasting in an open fire… Jack Frost nibbling at the snow…” Music has its effect on me.

I have a favorite song for the holiday that I continue to hum and sing even long after the Christmas holidays are gone and I keep on listening long before the next Christmas season begins and it is the song: “My Grown Up Christmas List.” And it goes:

Do you remember me, I sat upon your knee

I wrote to you with childhood fantasies.

Well I’m all grown up now, and still need help somehow

I’m not a child but my heart still can dream.

So here’s my lifelong wish, my grown up Christmas list
Not for myself but for a world in need:

No more lives torn apart, that wars would never start And time would heal all hearts

And everyone would have a friend, and right would always win

And love would never end, this is my grown up Christmas list.

As children we believe, the grandest sight to see
Was something lovely wrapped beneath the tree

But Heaven only knows that packages and bows
Can never heal a heart ached human soul.

Then a part of the song goes this way: “…What is this illusion called the innocence of youth. Maybe only in our blind belief can we ever find the truth…” And in a very emotional conclusion the song goes back to the wish:

“No more lives torn apart, that wars would never start and time would heal all hearts, and everyone would have a friend and right would always win, and love would never end. This is my grown up Christmas list, this is my only lifelong wish, this is my grown up Christmas list!

Now before we get all sentimental and fuzzy, the reason why I love this song is because it is a song that reflects a desired hope and not optimism.

Tim Keller in his book “Making Sense of God” says: “Delbanco’s cultural history of the United States has three chapters, three different hopes or stories that our society has given its people over the years. He names them “God,” “Nation,” and “Self.”

For the first phase of American history, “hope was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death.”

But then, under the influence of enlightenment rationality, belief in God and the supernatural began to weaken among cultural elites. Instead of finding ultimate hope in the kingdom of God, Americans began to believe in the sacred calling of being the “greatest nation on earth,” one that would show the rest of the world the way to a better future for the human race. It essentially substituted a “deified nation” for God.

Keller continues to quote: “Christian theology understood history to be linear, sovereignly controlled by God, moving toward a day of judgment, justice, and the establishment of the peaceable divine kingdom. By modern times, however, the Christian idea had been secularized into “the Story of Progress, or Reason and Freedom, or Civilization... or Human Rights.” So deeply is this idea of human progress etched in our thinking that it is embodied in vocabulary that describes good trends as “progressive,” bad ones as “regressive” or “backward,” and some thinkers as “ahead of their time.” And this kind of thinking has given way to what Keller calls “Secular Optimism.”

But today this kind of optimism does not manifest, as the modern day American youth is the first generation of young people who believe that they will be “worse off” than their parents. Depression, teen-age suicides and a general feeling of helplessness prevail. Even big-time businesses show this sentiment with the amount of money hoarded in their bank accounts refusing to roll them over to more investments and more businesses.

Optimism is not sustainable because progress does not fulfill our hopes. American historian and moralist Christopher Lasch points to the example of African slaves in America. How did they keep hope alive? As Eugene D. Genovese and other historians of slavery have made clear, “it would be absurd to attribute to slaves a belief in progress.” It was Christianity, Genovese showed, that gave them “a firm yardstick” with which to measure and judge the behavior of their masters and “to articulate a promise of deliverance as a people in this world as well as the next.”

Hope does not require a belief in progress, only a belief “in justice, a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.”

Hope that stands up to and enables us to face the worst depends on faith in something that transcends this world and life and is not available to those living within a worldview that denies the supernatural. And this is why “My Grown Up Christmas List” is my favorite because I look at it or better still… listen to it with a perspective of hope in the eternal. “No more lives torn apart, wars would never start, and time would heal all hearts, and everyone would have a friend, right would always win, and love would never end…” Isn’t this the message of Christmas that He who offers Eternal Hope is born so that in Him the real Hope is realized and when He died and rose again He grants those who are His access to that Hope in eternity? But then again… what do I know? I’m just a business speaker with a heart for the romantic filled with the sentiment of hope.

But may I ask… what is your grown up Christmas List?

(Mark your calendar, as Francis Kong runs his highly acclaimed Level Up Leadership seminar-workshop on Jan. 16-17, 2018 at SEDA Hotel, BGC. For registration and inquiries contact April at +63928-559-1798 or register online at www.levelupleadership.ph)