Most of us are aware that there is a particular syndrome known as the post-Christmas blues. It comes as the result of high expectations for a holiday that are never fully realized. It comes when we try to make Christianity into something that it isn't and it isn't about fairy tales where everyone lives happily ever after.

Real Christianity is far too honest for that.

Real Christianity knows that the world that Christ is born into is filled with danger and fraught with peril. It offers no guarantees of success or serenity, riches or material rewards. It is a world where, sadly, the innocent are abused, the weak are oppressed and the children continue to be slaughtered. But it is also the world that God chose to enter. The world that God chose to love. Real Christianity is committed to proclaiming that truth, to living out that reality, to announcing that promise.

It takes great courage to be a Christian and if we don't think that's true, we probably should be re-examining our Christianity. Real Christianity calls us into a messy, often malevolent world where we are to announce glad tidings of great joy. In the darkness of a world gone mad with greed and avarice, we are to light a candle. In a culture that seems to care more and more for fewer and fewer, we are to stand with the dispossessed and outcast. That takes a faith with fortitude to be sure but it is the way, the only way to discovering real Christianity.