My thoughts and prayers are with the grieving families in Newtown, CT. The Christmas season was the beginning of the life of the one who can best identify with them, being the one who Himself is a man of sorrows and well-acquainted with grief. Jesus knows and understands, and He is present with those who suffering at this time.  God bless them all!

Sometimes it is when we suffer, when we observe the universality of death’s decree, when we are debilitated, when we observe an extraordinarily barbaric bit of cruelty, when we are sidelined by a chronic illness, that we are impelled to pause and reflect on the love of God to sinners and rebels such as we are. We serve the Lord Christ, who suffered in our place, who learned obedience through the trials that he suffered. The trinkets and baubles that otherwise capture so much of our attention fade away, and the eternal things assume their rightful place. Then we know what it means to confess that God’s love is ‘as shoreless and endless as eternity.’

D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 194.