In recent days, during the overlapping Christmas season of 2025, our hearts are heavy as we absorb difficult-to-comprehend news.
- We grieve the tragic murder of Carl and Michelle Reiner.
- We mourn lives shattered by the mass shooting at Brown University.
- We recoil from the antisemitic terror attack at Bondi Beach.
By September 30, 2025, the Gun Violence Data Hub reported 11,197 shooting deaths in the United States alone, numbers that cannot begin to capture the human stories behind them, nor the many other forms of violent loss. By late November, nearly 400 mass shootings had been recorded, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
Even the Christmas story begins with the holy family fleeing a terrorist king at night, a quiet reminder that God chose to enter our broken world not from a distance, but from within it.
Not long after the heavenly host appears and wise men bring gifts, a messenger warns Joseph in a dream, “Get up,” the angel said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” (Mat 2:13 NIV)
Christmas in Egypt
How’s that for expectations of a merry Christmas? A family-loving Hanukkah holiday? Can’t God control Herod? What is God doing by allowing this to happen? Where is God when mass murder begins?
Have you ever been threatened or attacked?
Wrongfully accused?
God knows. He’s been there.
Heartbreak in this world? Yes. Suffering still? Yes.
But the first Christmas introduced something new.
Reversal.
Reversal of evil with the introduction of supernatural love.
Supernatural life.
“All night long . . . she had shivered in the darkness . . . listening breathlessly for the sound of the witch’s sleighbells. But now it seemed all that was about to change. ‘Aslan, she heard Father Christmas saying, ‘is on the move.’” The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, chapter 2
Christmas is God moving toward us
Christmas is the breakthrough of God’s supernatural love over evil, even as evil continues to mar the planet.
Love that invites you and me into a relationship with the Creator of all the stars and all the galaxies and all possibilities is announced by angels…
and come through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Faith in Him begins an odyssey of eternal life, joy, and hope.
Only God can lift us above all the fears and threats of terror and evil today if we let him.
How not to miss Christmas
Some people pass through Christmas without ever quite encountering it.
The religious scholars King Herod consulted knew the prophecy. They could name the place. They understood the texts. But they never made the short journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Knowledge alone kept them still.
The wise men did something different. They moved. They followed the faint pull of hope, curiosity, and longing. And that movement made all the difference.
Christmas is rarely missed for lack of information. We miss it when we stay where we are instead of leaning toward love that invites change.
There’s a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy demands that Schroeder tell her he loves her. Instead, he gives her a clinical explanation involving vitamins and beef liver. Lucy turns to us and says, “I asked for love, and all I got was beef liver.”
That cartoon captures a quiet truth. We are not transformed by explanations alone. We are changed by love that meets us personally.
I don’t believe God sent His Son to make us wealthy or comfortable, though those things sometimes follow. Christmas is about something deeper. It is an invitation to be remade from the inside out, to discover a love strong enough to heal what is broken and lasting enough to carry us beyond this life.
So this Christmas, will you stay where you are, or take a few steps toward the love that has been moving toward you all along?
Nice!
Thank you Christine!