My personal journey to joy at Christmas on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical

solutions to the problems that people face. As you're listening to this, we are right in the middle

of the Christmas season. And that is a time in our culture that is billed as a time of great joy.

We sing songs called Joy to the World. We sing songs called It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. You'll see on storefronts and shipping containers,

even just the word joy written on them. It is a season that is billed as a happy season of the year and yet for everyone that is not true

this can be a very difficult season of the year for many people and i want to talk about how people

could come to experience and know joy in the christmas season when their Christmases have not been a season of joy in their

personal life. And I want to try to talk about that by letting you know about my own personal

story. My own personal childhood was filled with a lot of sad memories of Christmas. Christmas was

not a happy time in our house. My mother became a Christian

late in her life, but before she became a Christian, she lived a truly godless lifestyle.

And Christmas would often be a hard season for her as she thought about all the things

that she would like to have had in her

life but didn't have. And unfortunately, as a mother, my mom was often very unhappy that me and my

brother lived with her. And so Christmas was a very painful time. There were things that she wanted

to be doing with her life that she was not

doing. She viewed in many ways my brother and I keeping her from doing that. And so from the time

we were very young, she would make our lives miserable a lot, but most frequently and often

most painfully at Christmas. My mom was a drunk and would usually get drunk on Christmas Eve and

Christmas night. And these would be times when she would really mercilessly abuse me and my brother.

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