Enjoy this blog post on A Life Overseas written by Betsy Kirk and published by the editor-in-chief, Elizabeth Trotter on December 19, 2024.
"Last year I had a different kind of White Christmas: I spent it terrified. My youngest son had come home from third grade with a crushing headache and a very high fever. He was emotional, lethargic, and weak.
On day four of sky-high temperatures, we had him tested for dengue fever. Though it is endemic here in Southeast Asia in rainy season, we hadn’t, to our knowledge, experienced it before. The risk of dengue is that it can cause the platelet count in the blood to drop, leading to a high risk of serious bleeding. This happened to our little boy. His platelets began to drop, and we had to check him into hospital on December 23.
By Christmas Eve, he was receiving an emergency plasma transfusion. Early Christmas morning, I watched him and my husband being loaded into an ambulance for a fast ride to the airport; he was headed to Singapore. Though his condition was stable, we went ahead with an evacuation because his post-transfusion numbers were not yet improving, and his situation could deteriorate.
After the ambulance drove away, I returned home with the other three kids, walked in the door, and sank to the kitchen floor shaking like I was driving over rumble strips. I was nauseous, dizzy, and unable to stop crying. Fear for our son had triggered my PTSD.
It wasn’t a Christmas of traditions and happy memories and celebration around the tree. It was a Christmas of wrestling with fear and staring death in the face. But isn’t that what Christmas is, after all? Isn’t that what all of us are doing, every earthly day—even, perhaps especially, on Christmas?
Since Adam and Eve ate that first disobedient pomegranate and suddenly found themselves threading madly through the garden looking desperately for a place to hide from God, fear has been our reality. Death is, and so fear is. The world is no longer safe. We know this, consciously and subconsciously, from our earliest years. Sometimes things happen that show us how much fear we have, that force us to realize the vast amount of suffering of which we are capable. But what better time for this to happen than at Christmas?
Because on Christmas we are also surrounded by reminders of the epic, mysterious, historical event that takes the fear out of the future and the stinger out of death: the incarnation of Jesus. God’s own son willingly chose to permanently alter his being, taking on humanity, being born into our world in order to defeat the darkness that makes us afraid. He accomplished not only “the death of death in the death of Christ” (as John Owen put it in 1683), but also the end of fear.
Little baby Jesus was probably cute. But his birth was an invasion of the darkened world, the captive creation, by its rightful king. As we sing in the words to the Christmas hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”:
Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the pow’rs of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.
Jesus came to drive back the darkness and rescue us from the shadows that make us afraid. In the words of my favorite Christmas verses, “Because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79).
Fear thrives on darkness; it is a result of the future being unknown, uncontrollable, unpredictable. But our future, at least our ultimate future, since the sunrise of the incarnation, is no longer unknown. It is full of hope. It rests on the promise that impossibly, unexpectedly, undeservedly, all things will come right. Take a deep breath this Christmas. The scarier your circumstances, the more precious is Jesus."
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