Do you have lofty expectations this Christmas?

I hear from many women who fear the family won’t get along or their husband won’t be as romantic as they had hoped, or the day will turn out a mess.

Our Christmas expectations can be muddled….or they can be met. Let me tenderly encourage your heart with this unexpected — and heart-warming —  story I received from a reader this past summer.

A woman called in to a radio show I was on and shared with me that all she wanted for Christmas was for her emotionally inattentive husband to read a book she handed him on how to connect emotionally with his wife. When Christmas came and he gave her gifts…

nowhere was there an indication, a note inside a box, or any inkling that he had read the book and fulfilled her greatest wish.

“I went into the bathroom and sat down by the tub and the tears started to flow,” she told me. “He couldn’t even read a book for me.” Then, she said, a peace overcame her as God spoke to the recesses of her heart:

This day is not about what someone else will or will not give you. It is all about what I have already given you.

She said that realization, which came to her tenderly in that moment, was enough for her to wipe her tears, get up, and go through her day with a peace and JOY as she focused on what the Lover of her Soul had already given her.

What about you? Do you have expectations this Christmas?

• For an engagement ring?
• A promise for a better year?
• Something romantic?
• For a “togetherness’ moment in your family?

While my hope and prayer is that you will receive all that you’re hoping and expecting, I tenderly encourage you to put your expectations in the One who has never and will never let you down. Focus on the gift you have already been given — the relationship you already have with the one who is Perfect , the priceless joy you have because of the One who gave His life sacrificially so you can now experience life eternally.

This Christmas let the tenderness of His words echo through your heart:

“I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness”

(Jeremiah 31:3, NASB).

Merry Christmas, my friend. And lean in to Him every second of it.