A middle-aged man walked from the back of the stage to the podium and began speaking; the program indicated he was the senior pastor and that he was delivering a message titled, “All I Want for Christmas.” I wasn’t that interested in listening to his sermon, but I didn’t think it would be polite of me to go back to reading the program, so I forced myself to pay attention—or at least make it look like I was. I spent a lot of time scanning the crowd as far as I could see to the left and right of us without making it too obvious that I was looking around.

I saw some handsome men in the crowd, and the women next to some looked far too old to be their girlfriends. Maybe I’d meet a nice religious boy. I tried not to giggle at the thought. I’d never dated anyone religious before; that would be a heck of a change after Dylan.

I’d started a mental tally of all the ways a relationship with a religious person would be different when the pastor said something that caught my attention. “Christmas is a celebration of the beginning of the end.” I perked up. I’d never heard it described that way before. It sounded a lot more sinister than “Christmas is love”—or peace, or goodwill, or any of the other ways I’d heard it described. “It is a celebration of the beginning of a life that would be cut down in its prime, silenced at its most glorious point—at what we now call Good Friday. Christmas is the beginning of Jesus’s life here on earth, of thirty-three years of living among His creation, and teaching them what it meant to really live. But there was always a shadow over that life. Jesus always knew that the other half of the story would catch up with Him.”

Whoa there! What was he talking about? This was going a bit beyond the feel-good Christmas story I’d been expecting: Mary and the baby and no room at the inn—I’d gathered that much over the past twenty years of caroling and watching A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV. I wasn’t sure what all this talk about the other half of the story was, but it didn’t sound very joyful to me, which was what I’d been expecting. I tried not to listen to the rest of his sermon, and instead cast my eyes as low as they would go to try to read more of the program in my lap, but the pastor’s words still got into my head.