I started to write this blog post thinking it would be a guide to surviving Christmas as singles. So many of us – not just singles – think of the holidays from the perspective of just getting through them. I don’t know exactly what it is about the holidays, but they seem to create unrealistic …
Holidays as a Single
How Jesus Defeated the Grinch
The signs that Christmas is coming soon are all around us now. Christmas music follows us everywhere we go, decorations line the streets and cover homes and lawns, people are scurrying around in stores agonizing over what gifts to buy, and the mail carrier is getting later every day as the volume of Christmas mail …
What Are Your Top Three?
It’s that time of year again in the United States when many gather around Thanksgiving Day dinner tables laden with food and surrounded by relatives and friends. But many also don’t. You know who you are. Your parents may be gone, siblings celebrating with in-laws, and friends with their own families. Or perhaps your spouse …
Reviving an Empty Heart at Christmas (and Throughout the New Year)
I hope I never forget the Christmas I sat in a beautiful candlelight service, feeling quite alone and depressed by all the displays of romantic love in the couples around me. Somehow I just couldn’t grasp the joy of the season that Christmas and I struggled to hold back the tears. But our merciful Lord …
Reviving an Empty Heart at Christmas (and Throughout the New Year)Read More
Five Steps to Enjoying Christmas
No matter whether you look forward to Christmas or dread it, the holiday season is upon us once again. For those who anticipate this time of year, it’s wonderful. But for those who dread the holidays the coming days and weeks can be a real struggle. Christmas, along with most holidays, is often portrayed as …
New Year’s Goal: To Know Him
What are the objectives of your goals for the New Year? Are they to make you a better person or to come to know Christ better? This was the challenge given by my brother-in-law, Dennis Reitz, in a sermon on the first Sunday of a new year. “Christian living is not a self-improvement program,” he …
A Valentine’s Day Without?
By James Johnson There may not be a rose, But the Rose of Sharon was given to you. There may not be Latin romance, But He walked the Via Dolorosa for you. There may not be a hug, But He outstretched His arms for you. The nails did not hold Him to the cross. …
A Christmas Story of Betrayal
At this time of year the story of Christmas and Christ’s coming to earth as a baby is often portrayed as one which brings warm thoughts to our hearts — a brand new baby, a young mother and her new husband, a twinkling starry night, angels singing, awestruck shepherds, a star over Bethlehem, a cozy …
Handling the Holidays
Holidays. Days you look forward to with excited anticipation, or face with a growing dread? Whichever emotion is attached to the holidays for you, or something on the spectrum in between, focusing on something and Someone beyond feelings is what God calls each of us to, no matter our circumstances. Jeremiah, one of the single …
Celebrating Love
Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, that day in February when love is celebrated. I have to admit that some years Valentine’s Day has seemed more like a day of mourning than a day of celebration as I remembered a romantic love that was lost, or perhaps that hadn’t materialized. We long to celebrate love because …
