Reading
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
John 1:5, 9–12 (NRSV)
Reflection
I don’t know about you, but I often experience disappointment in the days following Christmas. We spend weeks preparing for, anticipating, and celebrating Christ’s coming—only to wake up on December 26th to find that the world has not been transformed overnight. Suffering, conflict, hunger, poverty, loneliness, greed, and selfishness are still with us. No matter how much we want it to, darkness does not disappear on Christmas morning.
This year, I witnessed that same disappointment through the eyes of my nine-year-old son for the first time. He did not receive exactly what his heart was set on (and he knew it was his parents—not Santa—who made those decisions). We sat together and worked through those big feelings as a family. As parents, we chose what we believed was right for him, even knowing it might lead to disappointment. And in that moment, I recognized something familiar: the strange mix of love, hope, longing, and the resultant ache that so often accompanies Christmas morning. Perhaps that tension is not a failure of Christmas—but part of its truth.
Recently, I read a short sermon by pastor and theologian A.W. Tozer called “Finding Christ in Christmas.” I was struck by how he names the very disappointment many of us feel. But he also reminds us that “the end is not yet,” and that the world has “not seen the last of the Christ Child.”
The coming of Christ at Christmas is not a quick fix scheme, but the planting of seeds of hope and love in human hearts—turning us toward God so that we can participate in bringing God’s Kingdom to earth.
That insight reframed Christmas disappointment for me. My son’s longing, unmet as it was, revealed something deeper than frustration—it revealed his desire to be known, loved, and cared for. And desire, when nurtured and rightly directed, can grow. Our work as parents, and as Christians in community together, is to redirect our desires to that which will bring wholeness. Wholeness doesn’t come from sentiment, nostalgia, or just the right gifts under the Christmas tree, but in the form of a Person—Jesus. Christmas doesn’t end when Christ enters our heart, it’s just the beginning.
“Finding Christ in Christmas” by A.W. Tozer
Christmas will come and go again this year as it has done through the lost centuries and, after a brief moment of kindness felt, they of the cold, hard world will go on killing and hating and contriving to outwit and outfight each other. Things are no better, the cynics will say, no better than they were before. The whole thing is a childish myth. We know what they think, and we know what they will say. And God knows the facts seem to give support to their ideas. But the end is not yet. The world has not seen the last of the Christ Child. That there is yet in fallen human hearts enough traces of spiritual desire to stir them to brief tribute when the chastely beautiful story of Christmas is told is sufficient answer to the cynic’s charge. Men who can want to be good, if even for a day, can become good when their desire grows strong enough.
And all this is not mere theory. Thousands each year find their desire for salvation and holiness becoming too acute to bear, and turn to the One who was born in a manger to die on a cross. Then the fleeting beauty that is Christmas enters their hearts to dwell there forever. For who is it that imparts such beauty to the Christmas story? It is none other than Jesus, the Altogether Lovely.
