Are visions of sugar plums dancing in your head yet?

We are in the middle of the Advent season, that period of waiting expectantly for Christmas, for knowing that God is going

to do something amazing. He's going to show up on earth in the form of a baby so that he can

experience everything that we experience, so that he can show us what it means to live a God-centered

life, and so that he can die to set the world on fire and to show us what the

upside-down kingdom looks like, and to give us forgiveness and redemption through him.

That's an exciting period of the year, and for a lot of us, it's our favorite time of the year,

that waiting expectantly. But sometimes there's other sides to advent,

because not only are we hoping for what's to come, sometimes during the Christmas season,

we're reminded of what we've lost. And so today we have a great interview with Stephanie Duncan

Smith to look at both those sides of Christmas, how we can be excited, but we can also be

sad. But in both of those things, we can put ourselves under God and we can know that he is there

for us. And we're also going to hear from a woman who, I think, encapsulates a lot of what Christmas

means to me. Because just as Jesus came in the incarnation to become like one of us,

so we can be Jesus' hands and feet to those who need him. And that's a great interview too.

So thank you for joining us on the Bear Marriage podcast. I'm Sheila Regregoer from Bearmarriage.com

where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based biblical advice for your sex life and your

marriage. And today, we're going to talk

about Christmas and how we can live out that expectation in our own lives. So here is our first

interview. All right. Well, I am so pleased to bring on someone who's made a huge difference in my

life. So Stephanie Duncan Smith, who's the author of Even After Everything. Hi, Stephanie. Hi. So

glad to be here. Yeah. So just for all of our listeners, Stephanie was our amazing editor who came in

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