More than any other hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” signals the start of the Advent season. It’s a beautiful piece of music with its haunting tune and lyrics full of longing, anticipation, and hope. Christians have sung this hymn for centuries.
Zack Eswine writes, “Sometimes I greet the morning like a troubled atheist, lost in a god-empty story that cannot handle what frightens me…On such mornings, I need the name of Jesus spoken and his true story told to me afresh.”
Trying to suppress our emotions is like trying to hold a beach ball under the water: it only works for so long. Eventually, one way or another, the emotions shoot back up to the surface. So what should we do with them? The Psalms invite us to be open and unafraid before God with our emotions.
Joy is notoriously difficult to define. Is it a feeling? An emotion? A state? Is joy the same as happiness? Joy defies simple definition. But we can still talk meaningfully about it.
God redeems the broken fragments of our lives. He mends and restores, not by hiding our failures and scars, but by creating beauty out of the brokenness.
Close to 1,000 feet off Italy’s Ligurian coast, between Camogli and Portofino, an eight-foot-tall, 900-pound bronze statue of Jesus Christ stands on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.
