Hope this Christmas

About 10 years ago, I asked the Lord to help me see Christmas in a new way each year. I didn't want to get so excited about the decorations, and food, and presents that I just included Jesus' birth as a small part of it all. Each year since then, the Lord has helped me see something new and beautiful about Christ's birth. This year, I have discovered the importance of the hope that Christ brought to us all.

G.K Chesterton said, “Hope means hoping when everything is hopeless.”

The view of this dark world – with its violence, anger, confusion, and outright blindness – makes everything appear to be hopeless. During what is supposed to be “the most wonderful time of the year,” many families face the reality that hurt and devastation can find us no matter what the calendar says. We are never exempt from pain. But we are also never exempt from hope. If things were hopeless, the statement “I'm praying for you” would mean nothing, and the Bible really could be filed as an ancient and irrelevant document. If things were hopeless, Jesus would be just another infant, and the Cross would be just a block of wood. But Jesus came to bring hope to a hopeless world!

This Christmas, the word hope means more to me than just four, pretty letters that we use in our festive decorations. Hope means that in the midst of chaos we have something to hold onto. And we have something to hold onto because Jesus didn't want to let go of us.