The Miracle of Christmas

I work at a thrift store and donation center. I was going through stuff at work one day when I found a Nativity set. I pulled it out of the bag to make sure all of the pieces were still together. It was a nice set, but it was missing the baby Jesus. I threw the whole set away. There was no point selling a nativity set if it didn’t have Jesus.

There is no point having Christmas if there is no Jesus.

There is no point having Christmas without His Atonement for us.

There is a point if we believe Christ and not simply believe in Him. If we believe that what He did--lived his life for, suffered and died for--to heal us and redeem us--if we believe that what He did can make a difference here and now in our lives--in my life, in your life--then there is hope.

Hope in This Life

If there is any gift I want to give to my readers, as few of you as there are, or as many as will

come across this single article, I would like to share the gift of hope.

Thanksgiving night, I went to bed feeling weighed down. Some of my friends had been having relationship problems and I just felt bad for them. And I started to wonder about my own future, and how I was supposed to keep living my life if people were capable of being so horrible.

But then I woke up and I felt peace. And I had a lot of thoughts about why I or any of my friends needed to give up. And it just so happened that my scripture reading for that morning was Alma 14, where Alma and Amulek witness the martyrdom of innocent women and children at the hands of unbelievers. A therapist I had worked with in college had used that story to teach me about perspective. Yes, awful things happen. And sometimes we can’t do more than just sit and watch. But God has a plan to make everything right. If you can’t do anything else, trust Him.

We live in a fallen world where everyone falls short of the ideal. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying to do the right thing. It is still possible for friendship and kindness to exist between people of different backgrounds. It is possible to have peace in your heart, and peace between you, your friends and your family and everyone around you.

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The world wants to focus on the negative--to bring out every flaw, every failing that proves that living according to our conscience doesn’t work. But they’re wrong. You can do that, and still have peace.

What you have to remember to do is to focus on the positive. Think about the miracles that you see in your everyday life. Think about the people around you who are succeeding without attention in the media--the people who don’t have everything. Look at those who are making their lives work in spite of opposition. 

There is opposition in all things. Where there is great darkness and evil, great good can rise up to meet it.

Every single person around you is a son or a daughter of God. Every single person is capable of good. Every person has the light of Christ inside of them. I may not live like I believe that, but I want to.

All things that are good come because of Christ. Because he paid the price to justice, the Father can give us mercy. We have good things that make our lives richer, and we have the personal peace that makes it possible to balance our lives. In moments when we are discouraged, we have His goodness to lift us up and remind us that we are not alone. When we face the greatest despair, our Greatest Hope reminds us that there is still good in the world. There is still much to live for and to love. Peace in this life and joy in eternity are still possible.

Courage and Charity

The ideas I have shared above are what I believe to be true. But we may not be able to see that truth because of the sadness we see around us in reality. People make bad choices. They reject the light of Christ. They refuse to see the people around them as sons and daughters of God. And not every person you are close to or want to reach out to is going to choose to follow the same path you are on.

You have to remember that judgment is ultimately the Lord’s. You don’t really know what other people around you are capable of becoming, not the way He does. The test is, can you love them here and now, based on what you see? Can you know when to say “Yes”...and when to say “No” ? Charity, the pure Love of Christ, comes when we trust Him and choose to love even though that love could hurt us. It is courage.

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There are bad people out there who will twist good things to their own image, including your own good intentions. Even people you trust and depend on will disappoint you even if they didn’t intend to hurt you. Can you love and still do right by the people you care about even in face of the fear that they will fail you? 

What do you choose to believe, when everything you believe in is questioned? Can you say 'no, that’s not true, I don’t want to believe that,' to every doubt in your head? 

Choosing to believe that Heavenly Father understands and cares for us, choosing to believe that all the people around you are his children and should be treated as such, choosing to believe that God’s ways are better even if we don’t understand how or why they work--that choice takes courage. We may have to actively choose courage every single day, every waking moment when we are faced with adversity. Sometimes making that choice may not be enough to keep bad things from happening. But as President Monson says, “Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says, I’ll try again tomorrow.” Courage is what gets you to try and then get up and try again when you fail.

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Choosing to go on in the face of disappointment and adversity, choosing to go ahead and try for as good a life as possible in spite of the risk of falling up short, of not being as good as everyone else, in spite of living in a world full of the worst influences, is courage. And that courage comes from hope in something greater. That courage to live a Christian life in defiance of the pervasiveness of the world comes from the Atonement. It comes from God. It is our choice to use it. But it is possible. The miracle of Christmas is that that Christ came to bring us that hope, to guarantee that promise from Heavenly Father that we would not be left comfortless. It is my Christmas prayer that I will find this hope in my own life, and I hope that some of you reading this will be able to find it as well.