I’ve always enjoyed the magic of the Christmas season, but this year is especially significant. My babies are seeing their first Christmas lights, getting their first gifts, listening to the Christmas story for the first time, and hearing their first Christmas hymns.
 
Christmas is a season of Glad Tidings of Great Joy because of the birth of one promised Child. It’s an annual reminder that we’ve been rescued from the darkness of our fallen world by the goodness of God, and it’s a reminder that God doesn’t work the way we expect Him to. He works in the quiet, humble places of the world through our vulnerability and our weakness.
 
As much as I love Christmas, in past years, I sometimes struggled with its classic images. A young mother seeing the fulfilled promises and faithfulness of God embodied in her sweet infant was sometimes painful to celebrate as someone whose heart cried for her own child to hold.
 
Last Christmas on December 8, 2020, after years of waiting, I found out I was finally, at long last, really and truly pregnant. In utter shock and joyful disbelief, Cody and I cried and laughed and praised God for such an amazing, long-awaited gift. That year, singing about a baby in a manger while my own baby (babies!) grew was more sweet and more profound than it had ever been.
 
And sitting here one year later as I rock Emmy Lou back to sleep while Tessa and Crew sleep across the room, all I can do is reflect on God’s goodness and faithfulness to me personally and to His people. He has never forgotten us and never forsaken us. Through the waiting and the trials, on the mountaintop and in the valley, even when things seem darkest, He is present. He is good and loves us in spite of ourselves. He blesses us with gifts we can never deserve.
 
I pray that this Christmas you are able to trust in God’s goodness whether you’re on the mountaintop or in the valley. We wait together with anticipation and joy for the promises of God that are fulfilled in Jesus’ birth. In the twinkling lights, around the fireplace, in the reading of the Christmas story that you’ve heard a dozen times before, and in the hymns on the radio, I pray that you rejoice in this long-awaited and promised child, Christ the Lord.