I love the Advent season. As anticipation for Jesus’ birthday builds, the days become colder, shorter, and cozier. I find myself wanting to snuggle up under cozy blankets, beneath twinkling lights, while sipping hot cocoa and spending time with my family and friends. The whole season seems to encourage us to slow down. 

But I’ll be really honest here: Whenever I get under a cozy blanket, I almost always immediately turn to one thing: my phone. Rather than picking up a good book, engaging in real conversation with those around me, or even basking in the silence, my first response to slowing down tends to be picking up the very thing that produces the opposite effect.

It makes me wonder how often we fill the quiet moments in our lives with distractions, leaving little room to notice what is happening within us or to recognize the ways Jesus desires to meet us there.

Advent: Peace or Panic?

While the Advent season invites us to slow down and focus on what really matters, so much of the world’s approach to the weeks leading up to Christmas encourages the opposite. 

Social media is full to the brim with all the things we should be doing around Christmas. Suddenly, an imperfectly decorated house has us rushing to the store to spend money on throw pillows that won’t last more than a year. We quickly book reservations to ice skate and sled, throw parties to fill our schedules, and curate our social media feeds to present a certain image. We start writing long wish lists and spend our time researching material objects that we think will magically satisfy some longing within us. Between decorating, shopping, parties, and the comparisons our social media feeds encourage, the weeks leading up to Christmas can quickly fill our minds and hearts with distractions. 

Many of the fun, engaging, cultural traditions surrounding Christmas are not bad in and of themselves. Baking, decorating, gift giving, and celebrating are all wonderful activities, especially when done together with family and friends. However, when we start to fall prey to the frantic holiday pace surrounding the holidays and everything becomes stressful and overwhelming, we may have lost sight of the true reason for the season. While none of these things are bad, trying to do them all can leave us feeling fragmented, anxious, and exhausted. We can unintentionally fill our minds, hearts, and calendars with the things of this world, leaving little room for the infant Jesus. 

Fully Alive 

But feeling fragmented, anxious, and exhausted is not how Jesus wants us to spend the weeks preceding His birth. Advent offers us an opportunity to slow down and prepare our hearts for His coming. We do this through prayer, fasting, feast days, special hymns, and traditions. 

This year, Blessed Is She also encourages us to prepare for Christmas by recognizing the places in our lives where we need healing and inviting Jesus into those aspects of our humanity. This year’s Advent devotional, Fully Alive, offers us a valuable resource for that journey. Offering a beautiful four-week approach to embrace deeper healing, this study provides the perfect prayer companion to pick up under a cozy blanket instead of our phones.

Jesus embraced all of humanity when He became incarnate. There is no aspect of our own humanity with which He is unfamiliar. Our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual lives matter to Him. 

Exploring how Christ’s humanity offers us the opportunity for greater healing—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—the devotional guides us toward greater integration as whole persons. Taking time to check in with these dimensions of our humanity and reflecting on how Jesus comes to heal and redeem each part of us encourages us to slow down and focus on what really matters this Advent season. Through beautiful artwork, biblical meditation, reflection questions, and relatable personal stories, author Megan Hjelmstad offers us a way to counteract the frantic pace and many distractions that consume us as we prepare for Christmas. Reading this devotional creates space for a deeper awareness of ourselves as whole persons while inviting Jesus into the broken places within us. 

The Reason for the Season

The weeks leading up to Christmas can leave us feeling anxious and restless as we become caught up in comparison and a misplaced longing for material distractions. Fully Alive can help us refocus on the truth that we are made very good (see Genesis 1:31), that we are not ruled by the fleeting emotions and thoughts that are stirred up by the things of this world, and that our fulfillment is not found in gifts or objects, but in Jesus, the Gift Himself. 

In reality, Advent is a quiet season of preparation for the birth of our Savior in a stable. We may think that busyness and excitement will give us what we need to live fully alive. However, it is only through living a life in relationship with Him that we can truly become fully alive. 

This Advent, let’s spend less time striving to create the perfect Christmas and more time  preparing our hearts for Him. Let’s make room to recognize our own needs, care for our whole selves, and invite Jesus into the places where we need healing. I pray that we may all use this season to embrace new and deeper levels of healing by encountering the Healer Himself.