Have you lost hope in your life? If you have, it may feel like the fog that rolled in on this Christmas Eve morning…heavy, lingering, blinding, and hard to see even with your beams turned on high! My boys and I experienced a dense fog several years ago traveling home to see family. My boys were quite little, and you could barely see the front of the car. Talk about being petrified! I didn’t want them to know how scared I was, and together we worked to try and navigate through what seemed like an endless wall of BLINDING FOG! Luckily, we were in a valley, and the fog finally let up enough so we could see a few yards ahead of us.
Valleys are usually described as a low time in our lives. You’ve suffered great loss, you’ve been through a difficult life storm, you’ve been sent to prison, you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, or you’ve been fighting for your life with a disease. In these painful moments, you can do one of two things. You can continue to stay in the valley and lose your name, or you can have hope that the valley will only be for a little while, and you can make something good grow from it. Don’t stay stuck or lose your name in the valley. Staying in the valley of pain is like a chain that binds into thick steel that can never be broken! Nothing ever grows there but pain bodies of your past that keep getting relived with new stimuli that reminds you of them. Drive out of your valley of fog, and find your name again!
After a little while, the fog will lift, the sun will come out, and that star in Bethlehem will beam to guide, to restore, to heal, to bring hope, to shine, to release the chains, and to help all of us remember our own NAMES… Always remember your name, and come out of the fog to celebrate Christmas with the world! Merry Christmas!
