This is my newest article for The Gospel Coalition. You can read the entire article here.
I’ve loved Christmas for as long as I can remember. Since becoming a mom, I’ve had grand expectations for what the holiday season could look like for our family. Finally, a couple of years ago, with both my children firmly out of diapers and able to focus for more than 10 minutes, I decided this would be the December when we’d fully embrace Christmas activities.
So, between my son’s preschool Christmas party and my daughter’s Christmas choir practices, I scheduled everything from attending The Sound of Music at the community theater to setting up the tree to making gingerbread houses (with festive music in the background). And of course, we planned to attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It was going to be a wonderful Christmastide.
Except it wasn’t.
The Christmas season was miserable for us. Sickness plagued our family at every turn, and over the month, we missed every single event I’d marked in red and green on my calendar. I’d had such high expectations for the holiday season. Instead, I experienced disappointment—and the persistent feeling of being cheated out of the Christmas I’d dreamed about. But as I dove into the Word, I came to see that my ruined expectations afforded me a fresh opportunity to place my hope solely in the person of Jesus, not in what I hoped to get out of the holiday season.
You can read the rest of the article here.
