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Jan 08, 2026 06:00am

A Thrill of Hope

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Christmas looked different this year.

My house went completely undecorated—a first. My husband and I attended separate Christmases with each of his parents—another first.

Long before Christmas looked different, it felt different.

In September of last year, my husband and I renewed our home study to remain active in the pursuit of private adoption. In October, my in-laws’ house burned down. Shortly after came the announcement of divorce.

At the beginning of November, my husband and I stood in the middle of our flooded church basement. My hopeful husband and pastor thought we were standing in water and mud; it was feces.

On Christmas Eve of 2024, I received a text from my best friend that said, “CODE!” This was her informal way of telling me how the Lord had chosen to answer our prayers—she had breast cancer. The following Monday, she called and confirmed my suspicions.

Each of these events served as a launching pad for what would be 2025—a year of grief.

My husband and I navigated the restoration of an entire church basement. We also rode the emotional roller coaster of receiving three separate calls from our adoption lady, informing us of birth mothers considering private adoption—each with babies due within days or a week. Each call seemed promising, as if it were the answer to what we’d been praying for over the last four years, but it wasn’t.

I navigated cancer with my friend. While I thank God often that He chose to heal her here, it was a hard row to hoe.

One thing about grief is that it isn’t reserved for physical loss. We grieve many things—the things we’ve never had and the things we’ll never get back. Another truth about grief is that it changes capacity.

I didn’t feel holly or jolly this season. I dreaded attending holiday events this year. Grief makes you experience the same event differently—differently than those around you and differently than you once did.

Every year since my husband has been pastoring, our church has volunteered to sponsor a local family for Christmas. As the pastor’s wife, my duties include assisting with the shopping process and completely taking on all wrapping operations—two tasks I wasn’t sure I had time or emotional margin for.

As I gathered everything and wrapped each child’s gifts in different paper, I felt something I hadn’t felt all season: joy. In fact, each time I returned to the table and began wrapping, joy found me.

John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”

God loved, so He gave.

He gave Jesus—God incarnate, fully God and fully man—to be the one-time, perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Jesus came at a not-so-holly-jolly time. God had not spoken to His people through a prophet for four hundred years. There was political tension and social unrest. The Jews were experiencing heavy taxation at the hands of the Romans. Crucifixion had been invented.

The people living in this time—though grieving and enduring different hardships than I—likely shared many of the same emotions I felt this holiday season until Jesus arrived on the scene.

As the old Christmas hymn says, “A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices.”

Perhaps the joy I felt while wrapping those gifts was a small fraction of the joy Jesus felt when He left His heavenly throne to give us the opportunity for salvation. The joy He came to give—not as the world gives in a temporary, commercialized season, but as only the one true, living God can give—the same yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever.