Hope

From October to December, I celebrate my three favorite months of the year.
They are not my favorite because they are the easiest or the slowest, because they certainly are not defined by either word.

But in these months, where the seasons visibly change and the days seem very short, I seem to become more open to God's presence and kinder and more aware of the needs of others.

I think more about the gift of my children. I cry when I play Stephen Curtis Chapman's song, "All I Want for Christmas," especially as the little boy in the song pleads for a family to love him and to sing him "happy birthday" for the next 100 years. I wonder why God allowed us to have this privilege of knowing and loving Luke and Grace. I really can't believe it.

I think more about the broken and hurting people all around me, about those who face the kinds of suffering I've only read about, but never had to know. I think about these people in a real way, putting stories to the names I read in the paper and aching for the misery that I only have to imagine.

I think about my own brokenness, my small-mindedness, my narrow vision. I think about the suffering I've caused in other lives, for the ways I have unknowingly diminished someone else and made him/her feel small or unloved.

And I think about hope. I consider the possibilities of new life, and of new birth, and of new horizons and new dreams. I think about Jesus, not in some predictable or familiar way, but as the creator of all things new. As the one who builds, rather than diminishes, the one who binds up everything that is broken. I feel hope in a tangible way, and I see it in the face of the sweetest baby ever born. I marvel at his birth;I am in wonder that He became flesh for me.

And so . . . that's why I love this season. It IS the most wonderful time of the year.

Jana