If you’ll join me, we’ll seek more of the light and life of Christ and his righteousness in an often overlooked section of the Bible this Advent season: the Letters of John. So when our world continues to grow darker still and all seems broken and lost, we desperately need our Savior. Perhaps Charles Wesley adapted this phrase about Jesus from John 1:4, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”Ĭhrist brought light and life for when we face the darkness of sickness and war.Ĭhrist brought light and life for when our longings remain unfulfilled.Ĭhrist brought light and life to a world that celebrates evil.Ĭhrist brought light and life to give us hope in personal suffering.Ĭhrist brought light and life to help us see with an eternal perspective. So every year, when Christmas rolls around and I break out my favorite carols, I find my mind lingering on one phrase from “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”: light and life to all he brings. But now, as I look at the news or hear of another death or another story of racial injustice, I whisper under my breath with fierce conviction and longing, Come, Lord Jesus. I loved my life-I didn’t want it to change. But I couldn’t seem to force myself to do it. Back then, I knew we were supposed to long for Jesus’ second coming. My sheltered, risk-averse, childhood self could not fathom such a world. So much evil, corruption, sickness, and hunger proliferate. Since the fall, the world has always been dark. Unfathomable war, endless new ways people can own their truth, shaky supply chains, natural disasters, and financial instability abound. And the world around us continues to look scarier, darker, full of evil. Two years later, we find ourselves still trudging through its aftermath. Yet I remember thinking (what seems totally ludicrous now), this will never affect America. So when 2020 rolled around and the whisperings of a mysterious sickness began to surface, you would think that I-who am naturally pessimistic and have been forced by God’s kind hand to place my hope in the eternal-could have anticipated the worst. Through this process, I learned that my portrait of a perfect life was penetrable, and because of God’s gentle and kind discipline, I placed my hope in the only unshakable thing in the world: God himself. These pangs still rise up today, emotions that I’ve finally learned to bring to the gentle comfort of my Good Shepherd, who always chooses the best path for his sheep, even when it’s the most painful one. The most intense stage of my anger, doubt, and tears of grief took a year to work through. The bitter taste of medicine I didn’t want to receive, even if deep down inside I knew it could help me heal. ![]() Possibly the most misused verse in the Bible, Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” was no longer a personal source of endless encouragement. I didn’t even realize I bought this lie until around age thirty when, for the first time in my life, I didn’t get something that I desperately wanted. It was just like the American dream, but churchified. If I was a good Christian, then I would have a faithful and loving husband, as many kids as I wanted, a beautiful house, and what I imagined was the leisurely life of a stay-at-home mom. I grew up in a Christian home, and the church culture of the ’90s fed me a lie that I consumed and digested wholeheartedly: if I just followed Jesus, my life would be blessed. ![]() No one would ever call me an optimist, yet some part of me has always believed that things would work out for my good.
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