12/25/2025
It’s strange, isn’t it?
How something so small could carry a victory so vast. How soft, newborn limbs, barely strong enough to reach for His mother, would one day stretch wide enough to embrace the weight of all our sorrow.
How tiny fingers that once wrapped around Mary’s thumb would one day bear nails to set the captives free.
How the baby cries in Bethlehem,
and how those same lungs would cry out again—“It is finished.”
Those little arms, flailing in the manger straw,
helpless in appearance, yet holy in assignment,
would one day grapple with the monster, Death.
The shadow that hovers over hospitals.
The ache that swells in empty rooms.
The silence that echoes after the last goodbye.
That Death.
And He didn’t just fight it.
He crushed it.
Some days it doesn’t feel like death has been defeated.
the grief is louder than the carols.
I miss them.
I question how light could come from something this dark.
But then, I remember that even the Savior started in a dark womb.
That glory came wrapped not in golden robes, but in swaddling cloths.
That victory was born crying, in the cold of night, not in a throne room, but in a stable.
Not surrounded by the powerful, but by the poor.
Not with royal declarations, but angelic cries to shepherds in fields.
And maybe this pain,
maybe this, too, is where resurrection begins.
Maybe even this grief is sacred ground.
Because He came here.
To where it hurts.
To where it breaks.
To where death dares to grin and say, “I’ve won.”
But the manger says otherwise.
The cross shouts it louder.
And the empty tomb settles it forever.
So, even in the midst of tears,
I will dare to believe that those little arms still hold me.
That they still fight for me.
That death, though it stings, no longer reigns.
Because the child who once reached for Mary
now reaches through eternity,
to wipe away every tear,
to promise me that grief won’t get the final word,
and to remind me that the arms that once lay still in a feeding trough
have already crushed the grave.
And they are coming again.
To carry me home.
May this be a gentle Christmas, for each of you♥️🎄🙌 Sarah Trent
