✨ Up too late reading my book by the light of the Christmas tree ✨

✨ Passing the light from my candle to a woman with wrinkled, shaking hands next to me, joining the surrounding voices singing “Silent Night” ✨

✨ Listening out my window past my bedtime – certain I can hear sleigh bells ✨

Gathering with my siblings around the familiar voice of my Papah, repeating the story written deep in my bones.
 
“There were Shepherds. Angels. Flocks in Fields. And there was Night.”

Christmas was the one time a year I wasn’t so afraid of the dark.  

As with all our fears, I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was afraid of, but every day the sunset would fill my heart with dread. And I would wait anxiously, restlessly for the dawn.
 
Maybe it was the quiet, or the loneliness, or the lack of vision. All I know is that everything would be better when the new day would come.
 
When I was young, I didn’t know why these special days leading up to Christmas filled me with courage in the face of my fear, but they did.
 
Looking back, I think I know why . . . Everywhere there should have been darkness, there was light.
 
Christmas trees. Candles in Church. Lights on every house.
 
It was as if Christmas itself was fighting against the darkness that gripped me.

What if Christmas itself is fighting against the darkness that grips us?

Darkness may take many forms in your life, but the promise of Christmas is that there is a light that can illuminate even the deepest, longest dark.
 
Tonight is the longest night of the year. But, the hope we have is: This long night precedes the brightest dawn.
 
The days to come will only get lighter, brighter. We are more filled with hope for the dawn when we know the depths to which darkness can reach. 
 
The promise of Christmas is . . . no matter how dark it gets . . . we don’t have to fear the night. Because Light himself has broken through like the coming of the Dawn.
 
As the prophet Isaiah proclaimed:

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.