This week was rough just three days in with four structure fires and two fatalities. The best way to summarize my church’s Wednesday night prayer meeting is there are so many people who are sick, hurting or in need. 

It doesn’t help that the coming days are cold, wet and dreary. All such conditions are typical of wintertime but they do seem to make life’s challenges easier to deal with. 

In complete darkness as the power was out, my wife turned to me and said “I can’t wait until all this suffering is over and we are in heaven.” Her statement followed an advent reading as we remember the first coming of our savior Jesus Christ and await his second coming with great anticipation. 

It is fitting our celebration of Christ’s birth, Christmas, falls around the winter solstice which is the longest night of the year. It is in the darkest time of the year when we reflect on the first coming of Christ and the hope He brought.

In Psalm 90, Moses prays for God to have compassion on his people, to return to them and expresses a need for redemption from hardship and fleeting lives. His prayer was uttered many years before Christ was born to redeem the lives of sinners. 

Christ was a light shining in the darkness, fully God yet fully man, His perfect birth, life, death and resurrection brought us hope. According to Ephesians 2, God in His mercy and love made us alive through grace and faith in Christ when we were still dead in our sin so we can do great works. God answered Moses’s prayer. 

We know life is filled with death, pain, disease and war because of Man’s sinfulness. Yet it is through Christ we have hope in this darkness. For one day all believers will be united again in the presence of God. According to Revelation 21, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away.”

This Christmas season I’m exceedingly grateful for the hope found in Christ and I look forward to His triumphant return.