God Is Not Santa
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Christianity, Religion, Spirituality, Self, Nonfiction

God Is Not Santa

“He wants to move us from being consumers to contributors,” Gray notes.

Photo by Mike Arney on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been so lost. And I know it’s because I’m clinging to things that will never make me whole. Even though my life looks like it’s going great on the outside, on the inside, I’ve felt like everything is falling apart. I know it’s not valid materially, but it is valid spiritually.

And that’s because I need God now more than ever. And lately, I’ve felt this existential angst because, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I haven’t been putting God first. I’ve put other things that aren’t God before Him: work, success, money, approval from my friends and parents, and more. I haven’t put people first either, which leads me to be even more ashamed.

I know I can’t keep up like this — not because I can’t, but because it’s a spiritually empty way of pressing forward. It’s unsustainable. There’s always going to points where there’s simply nothing you can do. It’s not like I want to lose hope, but these days, it’s hard to find hope in the world. I find hope in God, and by extension, children of God like my family, friends, students, and neighbors.

In Colossians 3:2–3 (ESV), Paul writes:

“Set your minds on things that are above, not things that are on Earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

For me, putting God first and everything else second is key. Since COVID, I’ve given all sorts of excuses for why I haven’t engaged with Scripture and church the way I used to — Zoom church was too distracting, worship sounded worse online, and I was simply growing into more and more of a cynic. According to Luna Greenstein at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, religion and spirituality have a positive impact on mental health. They help people tolerate stress better by generating peace, purpose, and forgiveness.

Of course, I know that everyone has their own walk with their faith. I certainly did — I didn’t believe in God until I was in college and came to the faith after a lot of Christian people helped me while I was in crisis in college. I found God after wondering what was up with this whole Christianity thing that led some campus ministers and friends to be so kind when I didn’t deserve it.

But other people who were forced into faith when they grew up certainly have a different story, and I know many people who are hostile to any mention of faith at all. According to Greenstein, religion also gives people a group of people to connect with over familiar beliefs, which research shows leads to reduced suicide rates, alcoholism, and drug use.

For me, I don’t feel like I’ve been a good person, let alone Christian the last couple of months. I’ve bickered way too much about politics. I’ve let my pride and self-righteousness wash over me. I simply have not loved others more than myself and proving how right I am.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” Jesus says in ‭‭John‬ ‭13:34.

I know, however, that my struggle in my faith is not isolated. Many of us hold the wrong perception of God as someone who can grant all our wishes. I recently watched a TV show about figure skating, and one figure skater gets a hip injury that essentially ends her skating career. She struggles with her faith as a result and prays to God every day to make her be able to skate again.

Her brother comes into her room, knowing something is wrong. The two of them are very culturally Christian — they come to age in a Chinese church and a strong church community. The girl elaborates what she’s praying to God about, and doubts God if He doesn’t grant her wish. But the brother talks to her about how that mindset is misguided.

“God is not Santa,” he tells her.

Every day, he used to pray to God to make him not gay, but that wasn’t how God works. Instead, he rethought the way he thought about God. Prayer isn’t so you can change God or your circumstances. Prayer is how God changes us. The rest of the show is about the main character’s struggle with bipolar disorder, but the show enlightens how God restores even the most dysfunctional of relationships.

Along the same analogy of God not being Santa Claus, Darwin L. Gray at Christianity Today attributes our equating of God with Santa as a result of our consumerist society. Instead:

“He wants to move us from being consumers to contributors,” Gray notes.

As Christians, it’s important to ask ourselves if what we ask God for are to advance Jesus’s kingdom or just make us more comfortable with life. Of course, we should be honest with God if we want anything, but hold the key phrase in the Lord’s prayer first: “thy will be done.” For me, I want to be more successful, be a better teacher, advance in my career, become a better writer, and make more money. I want to become a better runner and a better athlete. And while it’s not wrong to want material things, God always comes first, and we have to love God even if we don’t have the things we want.

“You see, we exist for God. God does not exist for us,” Gray says.

For a Christian, the greatest risk is feeling like you don’t need God. And there are a lot of times I ascribe the successes in my life to my own merit, whether it was my own savviness or hard work, it’s easy to feel like I worked hard and I deserve success. However, even those tools were given by God. Every success and even every failure is a gift from God to grow closer to Him. Feeling like you don’t need God is always a reckoning moment for me that I’m growing prideful and arrogant, and need to be put in check.

This Christmas is one of those moments, where I’m growing close to God as my faith matures again. In this moment like anyone, I need God more than ever. The less I think of God, the less I pray to thank God, the more spiritually empty I am, much like I was before I became a Christian. This Christmas, loving God and loving others before anything else is the path forward, which is more gratifying than material riches any day of the week. As Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:17: