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.  

My mother is a teacher in an elementary school just a few hours north of Connecticut. Her name is Diane. The town she works in is an idyllic, upper class, picturesque, New England neighborhood not at all dissimilar from Newtown. And like Newtown, it is the sort of place where school shootings don’t happen. Shouldn’t happen. The kind of place that leaves you feeling like, if it did happen here, it could happen anywhere. Just like Newtown. I thought of my mother much last Friday when news of the massacre raced across my computer screen. And my mind went to my own wife, a mother named Carrie, who prays daily for our 3 boys that have to enter a school through which there is an electronic locking door and a woman who sits behind a glass window. A mother who worries about what it may look like in another few years for our boys to try to learn in places that look increasingly more like prisons than the academy; fortified bunkers instead of schoolhouses. A mother who now wonders if she is risking her sons’ lives by sending them off to public school every day. And I thought of the mothers of Newtown. Mothers just like Diane, just like Carrie, who carried their children within their bodies for 9 months and brought them into this world through hours of pain and tears and the greatest joy a woman can know. Mothers who could never imagine life without their child, and now are forced to. And in this season of Advent, I thought about Mary. The teenage mom who was forced to give birth to her first child on foreign soil, with nothing but swaddling clothes, a tired donkey, and a brand new husband whose only solace in this crazy story was that he talked to an angel in the middle of the night. I thought about the fact that just when it seems as if the long night has finally passed, and all will end well that another angel comes on the scene and tells them to run like hell. Escape. Run for their lives, to another land, because a madman is after them, slaughtering every male child under two in his wake. As Mary gathers up her child and heads out of town she can hear the screams behind her as the city burns. I am not a mother. But I have come to understand the powerful maternal instincts our Creator has endowed women with; instincts that are bent towards protecting, nurturing, and sheltering…at all costs. Instincts that would cause a woman to risk her own life for her child without a single concern for her own wellbeing. Instincts that have kept mothers across the nation awake at night this last week and inviting them to pray more, hug more, praise more, appreciate more and linger a little longer by the bedroom door to watch their children sleep peacefully. In this violent world, where mothers live on constant guard, I have been particularly moved by the words of God through the prophet Isaiah this week when he wrote "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” God’s use of the maternal metaphor should be particularly moving to us in such a time as this. As deep as the anguish is for mourning mothers in Newtown, God’s pain is no less deep. He knew these children before their mothers ever did. I thank my mother Diane for teaching me this truth and I am proud to watch the mother of my own children pour this truth into my 3 sons today as well. There is no greater gift a mother can share with her child in a world that seems bent on preying on the most vulnerable and innocent among us than the fact that ”God will never forget you.” Mothers of Newtown, mothers everywhere, need to hear the same message to their own ears as well. You are mothers, but you are daughters first, and ”God has not forgotten you.”

In March of 2013 a crew of sculptors will take hammers and chisels to the monument dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C. They will work to erase the words etched into the monument since its creation, and in doing so, will remind us all that a central tenant of leadership is humility. The controversial quote reads, “I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTIC, PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS,” and was intended to capture the essence of words from a famous King sermon in which he declared, "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter." The sermon, entitled “Drum Major Instincts,” was an adaption of a similar sermon delivered by a white Methodist preacher named J. Wallace Hamilton 1952. Both Hamilton and King were emphasizing the need for leaders to guard their hearts from the temptation to step out in front and lead the parade - the temptation to be the drum major. When the revised quote showed up on the memorial in Washington Maya Angelou said it made King sound like “an arrogant twit.” Choruses of similar criticisms were unleashed until a decision was made to remove the quote entirely, and with it, an attempt to ensure that Martin’s legacy as a selfless leader continues. Anyone who has ever served under a “Drum Major” will immediately understand why this decision is so important, and for those of us who struggle every day to fight the temptation “to lead the parade,” the removal of the misquote should cause us to stop for a moment of reflection on the condition of our own hearts, and the direction of our legacy. Perhaps most importantly of all, it should cause every one of us to consider once again the great cosmic scandal of the God-man who chose to enter creation by way of an unwed, teenage mother and her blue-collar boyfriend. We are skeptical of those who seek their own fame, and despite his right to move heaven and earth to announce his visit Jesus comes to us in the most vulnerable form one could imagine, through the least likely parents, in a strangers barn among a foreign land, in order to be murdered by the Roman and Jewish “drum majors” who he forgives with his last breath. We long to follow men and women who ensure us by their life and deeds that sacrifice and selflessness are their modus operandi. We recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. as such a leader and bristle at the thought of tainting this image with quasi-cocky sentiments etched into his legacy. But we would do well to remember that while Martin Luther King, Jr. disregarded the claims of others that he was a drum major himself, the efficacy of his story should lead us all back to the fact that he was a man who was passionately pursuing the true Drum Major in a parade that we are all invited to march in.

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.” These words were penned by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the confines of a Nazi concentration camp and they serve as a potent reminder for me this time of year that Advent is, indeed, the season of waiting and of expectation. I have also found that Advent is a time to reflect on the great divide between what I want and what I have. Some may read those words and fume in frustration that I have fallen prey to the same disease our entire country seems to be caught up in this time of year, reflecting on what I want and what I don’t have. Yet, what I am speaking about here is not longing for the newest Apple product, slippers, or another book to set on the coffee table, but those parts of my own life that still appear to be so far from anything that God could have ever intended for me. The bent and crooked parts. The twisted and misshapen parts that have never seemed to resemble anything close to the types of parts that could be of use to anyone. Broken parts, spare parts, and absent parts that make me wonder if, perhaps, I left the factory before I passed through quality control. These long, grey days of winter lend credibility to Bonhoeffer’s analogy of Advent to a prison cell, which appears in these hours to be more honest and accurate than any would suggest at first glance. Indeed, Advent has the ability, if we let it, to reveal the tension of the “now and not yet” reality we find ourselves in, and the reality that we find inside ourselves. It is fitting because freedom feels so elusive for me, as it does for many others. Peering over my shoulder at the last year I always recognize with a startling clarity just how few my steps have been these past twelve months, and how much further I have left to go. Perhaps this is precisely why so many of us will find ourselves making new resolutions within a week of celebrating the birth of Christ, for Christmas marks both a beginning and end for each of us. It is the year-end evaluation that meets each of us like cold morning air that burns nostrils as we inhale. It marks another year of finding myself, like the Pagan astrologers from the east some 2,000 years ago, falling prostrate before the tiny feet of the God-child to worship, knowing full well that the gifts I have brought him are wholly inadequate. But, as Bonhoeffer reminds us, Advent is also a type of prison cell in that it is a living reminder that “freedom has to be opened from the outside.” Not only from the outside, but only by the hand of a Jewish child reaching from the rough-hewn edges of a feeding trough. May this Advent season be marked, for each of us, by the great hope that this same child comes again this year to a broken and troubled world and, with nail pierced hands, stands ready to offer freedom again for the prisoners.