Advent devotion: That’s Christmas to me
By Jennifer Weyeneth
Love is a gift of hope and safety. It is the link between the heavenly realm of abstract deity and practical earth. I found love in the northern cold winter solstice sky as the brilliant Christmas reds were reaching across the white paste and sparkly landscape this morning. It was a perfect moment to reflect on the wonders of His love. 
I’ve thought about how this love travels at the speed of light to any situation as I remembered how God’s love has sustained our family this year. Love grows without trust. It hurries to make right the burdens of the wrongs. It grows in absent conditions. Oh the joy when Christmas lights blink, carols are sung, candy fills the jars and we share from our storehouses to neighboring schools and shelters.
Love is actual and concrete. Love is real. It is the brightness that shines in someone’s darkness; it is the hand that reaches across the emptiness to carry people to safety. It is a warm embrace of support for those who feel the energy of love being passed to one another in empathy. Love is fluid and a presence. It is the silent passive covering of paper over rock that wins in the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is the boiling room where problems are melted away and refined into beautiful individual works of art. It’s a wonder we have gratitude for these situations, yet we know love. We know when it reaches us and when we give it away. There is no condition.
Love is a necessity of life, powerful effectively changing everything it touches, especially at Christmas. If joy could be a verb, it would be love. The exponential factor of love gives it a superpower. It’s wild, yet completely chivalrous. And it is in the sunrise of each new day as my puppy dog bounds in the blanket of snow. I’ve given myself the best Christmas gift this year — love, and it is wonderful.
Jennifer is the director of the Great Minds initiative of the Davenport Schools Foundation. She is volunteer, a wife, and mom to four, and lives in Davenport.
