A Jolly Irish Christmas: A 4-Day Devotional With Rend Collective -Sample

If you’re anything like us, the New Year countdown to 2021 did little to erase or fix the pain of the year before. And really, almost a year later we found ourselves still picking up the pieces of one of the strangest years of our lives.

As a band, this time last year we were mourning the separation from our families, and wishing we could travel home to be with them on Christmas. We were facing the complete halt and loss of our jobs in the music industry, unsure of when we’d be able to return to work. 

Of course we weren’t alone in any of this. Many of us lost jobs, time with family and friends, memories, some of us even lost our loved ones. That kind of grief doesn’t just go away. It can’t be neatly packaged up and put under a tree. It stays with us, in our bodies, in the lines in our faces, in the way we see the world. Grief becomes a part of our day-to-day in a way that can make celebrating another year, and another Christmas a little complicated. 

But just as we carry our trauma and grief with us, we also carry something else— we carry the presence of Jesus. Emmanuel, God with us. Even though we may not understand why we go through suffering, we always have the promise that God is with us always. 

The birth of Jesus, His life as a human on earth, tells us something about what is important to God. It’s important to Him that He suffers with us, so that we would know not even the sting of pain, loss, trauma, grief, or death could separate us from His love. 

Maybe this is the best gift we can receive this year, through the birth of Jesus. We don’t have to brush over suffering, or prematurely declare “victory” and “healing” over the hard parts of this life. We have a God who is acquainted with pain and who doesn’t rush through the discomfort of grief. He wants to sit with us, to weep with us, to lift us up out of the ashes and declare His unending love over us. 

If you’re in a place this year where you aren’t sure you can sing “Joy to the World,” maybe you CAN sing “Christmas means Emmanuel, You’re one of us”? Maybe this is the lifeline this year, God’s full presence in the midst of our full pain. 

He is truly one of us. 

Verse: “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” John 14:25-27 (ESV)