From K-Love books, We're So Blessed is a new 40-day family-oriented devotional written to help your family recognize God's hand in your everyday lives, and to realize how truly blessed you are as a child of God.

Authored by three siblings who make up the Christian music group Kane, We're So Blessed, offers a personal glimpse into their childhood and family,

plus activity ideas and questions your family will love.

We're So Blessed is available now wherever you buy books.

A link is also in today's show notes.

Access More.

Yeah. access more. This is the Cultivate Podcast and I am Minter, and I am sitting at my dining room table.

It is Christmas time at the time of this recording.

So if you are listening in real time, then you're going to be able to track with kind of my setting that I'm going to talk about in just a second.

If you are listening later, all of the biblical texts that we are going to be talking about today will be as

relevant for you whether it is December 25th or it is July 4th. So I just want to let you know

this is evergreen material, but it is Christmas time for me right now. So I want to talk just a little bit

about this time of year and really how the holidays exacerbate whatever season we tend to be in.

In other words, they magnify what we are already going through. So if we are in a great time,

Christmas and, well,

Thanksgiving before that and New Year's and all of that, it makes that seem even better.

However, if we are in a difficult time, it makes it seem even harder. So the holidays just magnify this for us. And I will say this too, that the Hallmark

Christmas movies and the Netflix Christmas movies and all of that, they don't do us any favors,

right? Because the movies always start out the same. There's always some brokenness or some

lost love or there's a, you know,

boyfriend in the city that's, you know, really difficult to be with. But then the girl goes to

some rural place and she meets this guy who's like a wood chopper or something. And then they fall in

...