Radiance in the Dead of Winter

January 2025 Devotional
A New Year’s Eve Rebellion

A woman cinched her wool coat and gathered the folds of her shimmering gown with one hand, and then with the other, she reached for the hand of a man in a purple obsidian tux. As she stood up out of the car, they both looked into each other's eyes, and she felt a well-worn love envelop her. Further down at the intersection, a trio of twenty-something-year-olds with arms interlocked trekked through the piercing wind. Somehow, and with faces nearly frozen, they managed to fill that bitterly cold air around them with interminable laughter. Gaggles of people in their finest clothes speckled the snowy streets of Chicago. All of them trudging underneath amber street lights to celebrate the arrival of a New Year. All of them daring the winter to "just try and stop us." 

New Year's Eve is hands down my favorite holiday. I love the youthful elegance and the vibrant dazzling sophistication of it all. And because I have lived my entire life north of the 38th parallel, all of this radiance is dialed up by the contrast of the bitterly cold dead of winter. My knees are dry, my lips are chapped, and my knuckles are bleeding. I haven't seen the sun in days. I'm irritable and oh so tired. Then, on New Year's Eve, I dress in an armor of gold sequins and gather with my friends to show up and show off. There's a tenacious and rebellious taste to the holiday. The way you feel most confident when you are amongst your best friends. New Year's Eve is the celebration of survival, it belongs to those who have faced the cruelty of evil and have the chutzpah to live vivaciously. 

On one hand, none of it makes sense. Really? This is the New Year? Look around, everything is still dead. We are taking inventory of all we've lost. We're walking the perimeter of our lives and see the scorched earth of our homes and families. And yet, somehow, This. Is. The New Year. We're not done yet. The tape is still rolling. Something beyond our power, beyond our ability, is refusing to let our stories end in tragedy. A truth that goes beyond ourselves lives within us now.

"For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God." —1 John 5:4-5

This is a daring truth, a redemptive confident truth. We are eternal, the darkness is not. And because of Christ, we will outlive and outlast the darkness around us.

As you start the New Year, plant your feet in the hope of Christ, and receive this blessing:

May you find the moxy and verve to smile in places designed to scare you.

And now join me in this toast: 

And in the end

Death died,

And we survived.

Christ reigns,

And we have life!

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