A strong dose of encouragement

Take that anxious thoughts!

Emily Linder

Dec 30, 2024

There is a line in the song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” I find quite encouraging:

“I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet the words repeat

Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Wild.

If you think about it for even a second or two, the promises of the gospel are truly wild. A few that come to mind for me …

All bodies, even the most broken, mistreated, or misused ones, will be Resurrected to a state of glorious wholeness.
We go on living forever and forever after death.
Somehow the exceedingly depressing things that happen in this world will one day be all OK and settled.

Sometimes when I think about those things (especially the last one), I kinda go “But how? How could that actually be? That’s too good to believe. If that really happened it’d be, well, … wild.”

And that’s why I love that line in the song—maybe these things are supposed to feel a little wild, at least at first. What seems to me as quite impossible now might one day feel quite plausible.

I remember feeling this sense of incredulousness when dating dragged on a few years longer than I’d have liked, when my girlish fantasies of love were flickering out. “I can barely find anyone I want to go on a date with,” I remember thinking. “Find someone to marry??? That is crazy talk. So crazy in fact that I don’t even want to talk about it or risk dreaming about it.”

But here we are. Being married to Adam is so, so, so much better than any girlhood fantasy I might have dreamed up about marriage. I am not overstating when I say this sacred relationship feels like a miracle to me everyday.

It feels wild. Sweet.

So if you want something good, but it feels to you right now like an outlandish dream, that might be a very good sign. Some of life’s sweetest things feel the wildest at the outset.

And if believing in what Jesus Christ taught so long ago and what His prophets teach today feels a little wild sometimes, that may also be a good sign. How could this message not give us a sense of awe? How could it not leave us wondering how?

But I hope that as I grow up, it will get easier and easier to believe in Christ and His promises. I don’t want to be like a group of people in scripture who said, “It is not reasonable that such a being as a Christ shall come.” In a way they were right—this isn’t reasonable. But they were also very wrong—such a being as Christ did come and while what He accomplished on this earth wasn’t reasonable, it is very real.

Christmastime is a special time to revel in how amazingly unbelievable this all is. I love what philosopher Adam C. Miller wrote in his lovely little book The Christ Child:

“At Christmas, we celebrate the fact that God became a baby.
Ten fingers and ten toes? I assume. Five or six pounds of flesh and bone, dimples, a shock of dark hair, eyes squeezed shut, already hungry, sucking His thumb? I imagine.
And all this—God as baby, Christ a child—is pivotal to ‘the great plan of the Eternal God’ (Alma 34:9). This, somehow, is how God sets in motion His wild plan to save us.”

His wild plan to save you is in motion. It’s happening right now, friends! And our lives might feel a little brighter if we were better at remembering that.

So no matter how wild or how sweet, His words let’s repeat.

Other little essays I wrote that you might like: