I was sitting at a table with my sister, a younger friend, and four older ladies at the ladies’ Christmas party at my church, and being much more of a listener than a talker, I enjoyed hearing the older ladies swapping accounts of holiday life. There was talk of Thanksgiving and how their meals had … Continue reading Christmas Longing
The first glimpse of Christmas comes thousands of years before the Lord Jesus came as a baby to the virgin Mary and her husband Joseph. Adam and Eve whom God had created in His image had just disobeyed God's one command--Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of the knowledge of good and … Continue reading The Necessity of Christmas
Some of my first memories of emptiness are from the Christmases of my childhood. It was after the last gifts had been opened and the beautiful wrapping lay crumpled and discarded all across the floor that the hollowness would creep across my heart like a very dark shadow. The weeks of festive anticipation came to … Continue reading My Christmas Journey from Emptiness to Joy
Oh, Joy, You came to us in the night— a baby boy—made like us— oh, God of might, small in Mary’s arms, whom Herod could not kill.
That Christmas comes at the end, in the final breaths of a wasting year, is best. After the muscle-ache of trekking graveside and back, graveside and back; after the haunting loneliness— of beauty-gazing and solo-missions, of incomprehensible party chatter, of home without its people; after the long war— the blitzkrieg of unrelenting lies, and the … Continue reading In the End
Gratefully His 