I love that this baby Jesus looks like Ollie. I don’t know who this artist is, but I need this painting.
I forget how much I genuinely love Christmas. I adore it. I cried when it hit me that it was over. I love the feeling it brings—warmth and peace, like snuggling up with hot chocolate and your favorite blanket, surrounded by your favorite people.
But it’s more than that. It’s a light, like the first rays of dawn that melt the frost after a frozen night.
But it’s more than that. It’s hope. It’s a perfect love and kindness, the Rescuer carrying a lamp in the dark, to show you the way back Home.
Yet it’s still more than that. It’s elevated. A warmth, peace, light, hope, kindness and perfect love that words can’t adequately describe, and the mind can’t quite grasp but knows it’s there. That’s because it’s from Heaven, sent when we need it most, when the days are mostly darkness, the ground frozen, and the spirit weary.
It’s the love of God, breaking through the cold winter night.
I think of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritans were a people considered mongrels and foreordained to damnation. Yet it was the Samaritan in Jesus’s parable that stopped to help the beaten and broken traveler, not the priest or temple worker.
The Savior is the Good Samaritan. He was cast out, “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and aquatinted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3)
To me, this is what Christmas is truly about. Dark, frozen days echo the coldness that comes when you feel broken, lost in the dark and alone. God’s love is warm light held by the Rescuer, rushing into the night to find you, because to Him, you are not lost, and you are worth saving.
If you ever feel broken, full of sorrow, misunderstood, cast out or alone… there is Someone you can turn to, Someone who loves you perfectly. His cradle was a manger. His life’s mission was to break down barriers, teach compassion, forgive and heal people. Through His Atonement, He walked in your shoes. He did this so He could know exactly what you’re going through and how to heal you. If you turn to Him, He will run to your rescue. He will uplift and guide you. I know this because I have lived it, time and time again.
Where Rose Writes Very True Stories 