Our Greatest Gift

It’s Christmas Eve again. That night of nights—that magical series of moments when it seems like the world holds still to remember. A pause. A breath. A moment of holy respite that transcends the clamor and bustle that otherwise fill our lives. A moment when heaven seems to reach down and touch the earth as it did that night so long ago in Bethlehem.

Tonight, I join in that silent sense of awe and wonder. My heart joins with the thousands of others who contemplate the boundless goodness of our God in sending his Son as a Babe to walk our mortal journey. I stand in awe of that holiest of gifts—the Gift that not only came to the Holy Land millennia ago, but is likewise efficacious in our lives today. As I contemplate the countless ways in which that Gift has blessed my life over the past several months, I am humbled by the grace and mercy and love of God evidence in the miracles I have seen. I have felt the transcendent love of God for His children.  I have seen Him send comfort to those I love when they cried out in desperate need. I have felt His sustaining power holding me up when I thought that the weight of homework and homesickness would surely crush me. I have witnessed fervent prayers be answered in ways that revealed the mercy and perfection of a God who knows our need better than we do. I have witnessed miracles wrought by the priesthood, from the binding of an eternal family, to the offering of words of inspiration and comfort. I have seen God moving in His majesty and power.

And I am deeply grateful for those miracles I witnessed during my first semester of grad school. This blog post is insufficient both to compensate for my online silence of the past several months [as countless blog posts that now reside somewhere on my computer were abandoned half-baked, neglected as I analyzed Akhmatova’s Requiem, or graded 2000+ pages of Russian homework, or wrote three dozen pages about Russian literature], but even more so, to express my profound gratitude for the gift of God’s Son. As one of my favorite names for the Savior—Immanuel—indicates, God truly is with us.

Christ did not come for just one night in Bethlehem.

He did not come just to be remembered once a year on Christmas Eve, only to be forgotten again come morning and the flurry of ribbons and crumpled paper torn from packages.

He came for every day of our lives.

He came to heal.

To love.

To support.

To sustain.

To bring joy.

To comfort.

To encourage.

To forgive.

To make holy.

Day by day.


And so as I sit in my room this snowy evening, surrounded by both the peace of knowing Christ came and the joy of having felt Him work miracles in my life, I am filled with gratitude for the greatest Gift given to mortal man. Truly God is still with us because of that night in Bethlehem.

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