It's Christmas week.

Welcome to the Ransomed Heart Podcast. I'm Alan Arnold.

And we are in the fourth of a four-part Advent series with John and Craig recorded in 2014. Now Christmas

week is a time where everything comes together. It's the moment we've all

been waiting for and yet often we enter into it exhausted

overwhelmed distracted and feeling a loss of hope. This podcast is a Christmas prayer. It's John and Craig

offering you Christmas mercies and blessings this holy week.

You talked a couple of weeks ago about there's the holiday and then there's the holy day and boy if it's not a holy day I'm not going to make it through the holiday.

Yeah. It's just incredible.

Yep.

And we know friends as you're tuning into the Ransom Heart podcast with John Eldridge and Craig McConnell here in the fourth week of

Advent with Christmas just feeling like moments away. We know we get it. Life is busy, life is crunch, demands, disappointments, frustrations,

frustrations, you know whether you're having to deal with last minute crunch stuff at work so you can get a few days off or

you're dealing with family relatives, you know, friends, all of that and there's something particularly demanding about

the holidays and we love them we love the holidays I love this time of year but the truth

is it can also be pretty demanding and exhausting and I think one of the reasons

for that is we abandon our normal rhythms.

You know, those things that we tend to do that bring us life, bring us God that center us, you know, the daily

prayer in the morning, a few minutes of quiet, listening to worship on the way to

work or you know whatever it is, that pause at

lunchtime or that pause in the evening to just stop, pray, find God again. We tend to just abandon all of it during the holidays like we don't need it.

And actually is the season we need it most of all.

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