Most years I’m all about Christmas. By October. However, something was different this year. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But this was not most years.

You can chalk it up to the weather or feelings or whatever you like, but this year I needed to have patience in waiting for Christmas to sort of come to me instead of me rushing into it. I love everything about the season – the giving, the reflecting, the coming together of people. But this year, I couldn’t seem to find it in the same way I usually did.

I was thinking early one morning about the prophecies of the long awaited Savior – how an entire nation waited for what seemed like endless years for a King to come and make everything in the world okay again.

And then a baby was born – in the most unexpected  place and in the most unexpected way. His arrival was so unlike what they’d imagined it would be that so many of them missed it.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this season, it’s that sometimes we have to wait for what we’ve been promised. And that those promises might not look at all how we thought they would.

Normally I find Christmas in the lights and the gifts and the excitement and the parties and the Christmas plays… but my season hasn’t had most of those elements and I was scared I was missing it. The days of December we flying by.

But this year, instead of investing too much  in creating a feeling, I’ve been quieting my soul and reflecting on one simple phrase:

“A thrill of hope.”

You see, the Savior of the world didn’t come in a rush of lights – with drum rolls and confetti and excitement to take your breath away. Instead, he came on a quiet, cold night, to a world that didn’t have any room for him. And with that coming, brought with Him the greatest of all hopes.

We don’t always need something big and powerful to give us hope and stir our hearts. We often need the quiet, the peace, the fulfillment of a long-awaited promise – something that grows slowly, that teaches us and lives among us for a while until we finally begin to understand it, recognize it, and trust it. That is how hope comes.

And even in its quietest way, when hope comes, it is always thrilling.

Let your hearts be thrilled and full of light. A Savior has been born.