When my son was little, he received for Christmas a children’s book about the Raiders football team customized with his name and photo—placing him in the story. In the action. He was astounded.

But here’s what I find truly astounding. All of history past and future is one grand narrative of love. And you and I, as the object and expression of that love, were written into the story from page one. Our names are in the book. We even know how the story ends.

Just as many of us have received healing for our broken hearts and bodies, so the setting of our stories—earth itself, sick and fractured as it is—will one day be restored to perfect health.

Nearly 300 years ago, Jonathan Edwards described the tension of the setting you and I now inhabit.

There are many principles contrary to love, which make this world like a tempestuous sea. Selfishness, and envy, and revenge, and jealousy, and kindred passions keep life on earth in a constant tumult.

It’s no wonder we novelists can so easily dream up conflict for our stories! We’re surrounded by it.

The Twist

But Revelation 21 and Micah 4 reveal what’s coming for those who choose to live with God forever. Edwards describes it as a place

the God of peace and love fills with his own gracious presence, and in which the Lamb of God lives and reigns, filling it with the brightest and sweetest beams of his love; where there is nothing to disturb or offend… where there is no division through different opinions or interests, but where all in that glorious and loving society shall be most nearly and divinely related.

I still struggle to accept that the only work I do that matters is bringing a foretaste of this promise to my itty bitty corner of the land. We begin to do this the moment we accept our belovedness, and then more and more as we learn to live out of it.

Every December people across the globe celebrate Jesus’ birth in human form. But that wasn’t the beginning of the story; it was the twist no one saw coming. Into hope-starved Judea, into Bethlehem’s dust and squalor came a love letter from the heart of God. The author of our story making a way for us not only to endure but to hang on strong, swimming in an ocean of his love and splashing it on others. Forever.

Friend, we are far from hopeless in this land of perpetual tumult. Every good story has a catalyst. A moment where the protagonist passes through some kind of door of no return and nothing can ever again be the same. Christmas is the radical, joyful, triumphant catalyst in God’s story… and a weary world rejoices.

Whatever you’re going through, won’t you rejoice with me today in this… You and I were there in Bethlehem. If you belong to the “glorious and loving society” of “divinely related” beings, your name and face are forever etched in the greatest story ever told!

Hallelujah and Merry Christmas!