Surviving Christmas With Jesus

Being alone year after year, seeing the pictures and hearing the joyful descriptions, wears on you. Then there's the frequently overlooked elements of loneliness. The associations we are forced to endure during gatherings. The family members or their significant others who we don't see eye to eye with, or who have wronged you somehow, but now we're forced to sit in a room with them and be their captive audience. Let's not forget the loneliness of being bullied, empty nesters, and those who have suffered the loss of a loved one. These later catalysts for loneliness are sometimes the most damaging. These leave holes in our very being, they scar the tissue of our hearts, they imprint on our ever-firing minds.

Surviving Christmas with Jesus brings a message from each chapter of Luke's gospel for the first 24 days of December, and revisits the birth of Jesus on the 25th. Although I am a graduate of Bible college, this devotional is in no way meant to be a biblical exposition or theological wellspring concerning any of the excerpts used, nor the Gospel of Luke as a whole. Each excerpt focuses on an aspect of loneliness derived from the selected chapter, and draws a parallel for those who are experiencing loneliness in their own lives. This unique devotional doesn't focus only on one particular "type" of loneliness, but speaks to various examples in different contexts in which someone may find themselves longing for togetherness.

In addition to the excerpts and devotional reading, each devotional entry encourages the reader to read the chapter that the excerpt is taken from each day. In addition to the focused text for the day, the reader will read the entire gospel of Luke throughout the month of December. On Christmas day, the devotional will expand from the Gospel of Luke to include additional excerpts from both Genesis and Revelation to bring the very brief, peek into the overarching story of the Bible -the story of where it all went wrong, why we needed Jesus to come into our broken world, and how the story culminates in us being with God for eternity.