Merry Christmas!

Ever since I was a little girl, one of my least favorite days of the year is the day the Christmas tree comes down. The lush, green, fragrant tree so carefully chosen and joyfully decorated just a few weeks earlier stands dry and droopy in the living room, slowly being stripped of the lights and ornaments that made it so gloriously beautiful before. Sadly, we carefully wrap the same ornaments which a month ago had been so excitedly unwrapped amid exclamations of “Oh, remember this one?” and “Here’s the one we got when…” and “Oh, honey, hang that one near the top—it’s my favorite!”

The anticipation of the beginning of the Christmas season is what makes the end of it so sad. Each year, when we pick out our Christmas tree and open the dusty boxes of toilet-paper wrapped ornaments, I am filled with expectations of good things to come. The cheerful noisiness of family gatherings, tastes and smells of annual baking, quiet evenings sitting in the living room lit only by a thousand twinkling Christmas tree lights, the crinkling of wrapping paper as gifts are wrapped and arranged under the tree, the satisfaction of traditions revisited, the giddiness of the kids as they drink it all in, the familiar words of my favorite Christmas carols…

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices!

Hope.

That’s what distinguishes the first day of December from the last. Christmas begins with hope in all that is to come. But inevitably, the dreaded day arrives when the boxes must be re-packed and the tree carried out, and the hope that welcomed the season somehow gets carried out with it.

But it doesn't have to.

For the last nineteen months, our family has lived in constant expectation and anticipation of the arrival of Israel. We have worked and prepared and planned and prayed, and for all these months, we've lived in a state of suspense because we are waiting for him. Our daily lives go on, certainly. We sleep, eat, work, play, shop, clean, mow, wash, learn, teach, snuggle, travel, argue, plan, cook, fix, read—but in the midst of it all, our minds constantly return to him.

When will he come? What will he be like? How will it change us?

A little more than two thousand years ago, people were asking the same questions. Like us, they were waiting for a Son. And, like us, they were sustained by hope.

Hope that He would come, just as had been promised. Hope that He would be all that had been written about Him. Hope that He would change everything.

And He did.

And He was.

And He has!

The real hope of Christmas isn’t found in any tradition, no matter how joyous.

Instead, we celebrate a hope already fulfilled—the Son of God, laid in a manger and later nailed to a cross. And that hope will never come to an end!

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God!

Romans 5:1-2

May your celebration of the hope given to us by the birth of our Savior carry you through every day of the coming year!

Merry Christmas!