Last week WestJet Airlines produced a clever promotional
gimmick that managed to take YouTube by storm gathering over 300,000 views in
just 24 hours. Today the viral ad has now grown to well over 30 million views. 30
million. You can join the masses by viewing it here.
Since you are able to watch it for yourself, I won’t waste
your time by regurgitating every frame. But I will offer a small summary
and suggest that the feel-good marketing stunt actually brought to mind for me deep
questions about my prayer life.
In the, admittedly, moving plot the folks at WestJet set up
a video screen and invite passengers on two of their outgoing flights to tell
Santa what they want for Christmas. Behind the scenes employees are busy taking
notes and while the jets take flight, they hurriedly rush out to the mall to
fetch whatever the passengers have requested. When the planes touch down, gifts
spill from the baggage-claim.
What caught my attention (and now, what will catch yours) is
what happens at the 3:55 mark when one of the passengers opens his giftwrapped
box of…socks and underwear. Socks and
underwear. All around him passengers are dancing and weeping and embracing
strangers as they tear into gifts containing snowboards, tablets, cameras,
plane tickets and even flat-screen TVs while he squats on the floor hovering
over his…socks and underwear. The camera cannot disguise his expression. While
he forces a smile, you know he is inwardly kicking himself, repeatedly, and
very hard.
It was a perfect illustration for my prayer life. In my
cynicism and doubt, amidst my unbelief in the goodness of a Father who desires
to give good gifts to his children, surrounded by my independent and
self-sufficient façade, I ask God only
for those things that I could easily get for myself. Out of fear, or
self-protection, or perhaps to shelter my frail heart from disappointment, I
dare not ask for those things that God alone could ever give me.
Please do not read here echoes of a “name-it and claim-it”
theology or a prosperity gospel of “health-and-wealth. ” These too are far less
than the best of what God desires to give us. In this season of Advent, these
days of waiting, what if you spent the next week pondering in quiet honesty,
what is it that I really want?
What if you dared this Advent season to ask, not for socks
or smart phones, but for unconditional love, forgiveness, healing,
reconciliation of wounded relationships, a sense of belonging, purpose and meaning.
And what if you dared to ask for a Father who loved you not because of
what you had accomplished, but because you were, quite simply, His child.
And what if you asked for your Father to show you, in no
uncertain terms, that he would not forsake you, that he was infinitely for you,
and that the forgiveness and inexhaustible love he offered you was not going to
be rescinded.
And what if he gave you everything you asked for in this
list? What if he actually gave you Himself, freely and fully? What if his
promise to be Immanuel, “God with us,” was not an idle guarantee, but a
covenant?
I wonder. Would you actually take the gift that was offered?
Or would your pride and cynicism cause you to simply leave the gift at the
airport, because you doubted it was really for you, of that it was ever intended
to be taken?
Maybe it would just be safer this year to just ask for socks and underwear again instead.
