December Hope

The holidays can be a difficult time. Maybe it’s the first year without a loved one and one less stocking to hang. Families are missing soldiers on active duty far away in the Middle East. The hospitals are busy with new diagnoses and grim circumstances. Clouds of financial crisis and unpaid bills loom over our heads with the realization that 2013 may do us in. And today there are those that are burying their little ones because of unsolicited evil last week in Connecticut. Kind of makes you wish December would be better passing us by. Everyone has a story. And maybe Christmas 2012 is one of the hard chapters.

I think it would be easy to wish the holidays away, even understandable. But I think we might miss something in the process. And no, I won’t go into commercialized sayings that Jesus is the reason for the season or that Christmas is about giving and not receiving. It’s more than nativity scenes, carols, candles held on Christmas Eve, and reading Matthew chapter one. It’s about hope. And while those are all wonderful holiday traditions they mean little without the message of hope defining them.
After the fall of man and the beginning of choice the world had little hope. Our poor choices introduced famine, murder, sickness and so on. How heartbreaking for God. I read once in a Tozer book about the attributes of God that He could only be good and that it was impossible for Him to be anything but. This truth highlighted something for me in the midst of our own present day darkness. If God can only be good and if He is the characterization of love then sending a savior in human form was the beginning of hope. Hope that in the middle of pain and tragedy that we could still hang on because someone already made a way for us. The tiny baby that grew to be the sacrificed Lamb of God changed it all. In one birth and in one death God demonstrated love through hope. And that is why we still have courage to walk through December.