Being Still With God In The Holidays

Last updated on: December 21, 2025 at 1:21 pm by Mark Williams

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Being Still With God In The Holidays 2025-12-21T13:21:14-07:00 Mark Williams

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This an incredibly busy….

This is an incredibly busy time of year. It runs the spectrum of emotions-from overworked, financially over-stretched, sad, ecstatic, joyful, suicidal, worried, pleased, hungry, grossly overfed. It is just about every feeling or emotion one could have, sometimes piled on top of each other, in the dark of winter-actually-at any time of the year, but it lands here and now. I think, somehow, we lost our way in this season. We find ourselves ‘having to’ do so many things just to keep up with the Joneses so to speak. We gotta put up lights, gotta do a tree-is it real or fake? How many cookies do we need to make for the Bernstines dinner party? Does Dougy really wear a large and not an extra-large?

We are five days away from The Big One. It’s funny, this isn’t the ‘Big One’ for Christians. That comes in March or April-whenever the calendar says so. It’s not the Big One in summer, like the Fourth. It’s central character based on a real human named Nicholas almost eighteen hundred years ago and the modern image was made iconic by a cola company in the early twentieth century.

…we want those days back.

Now we want those days back. Where we curl up and watch black and white movies with Jimmy Stewart and miracles at Macys. We are struggling for those moments, while we listen to the rhetoric of the world.

…find a quiet spot….

But if you can find a quiet spot, mine is right now, in the pre-dawn mornings, you build a good cup of coffee, put on your warm bathrobe or sweats, and find a quiet spot in your house, maybe in front of a fire–in a fireplace of course-don’t get weird, and if you are quiet, you will find the drum beats grow quiet and the anxiety about life start to fade. Maybe it’s the Pandora music playing and the coffee or-

-maybe this holiday season, leading up to next week, really is connected to something holy. Here’s a thought, maybe, just maybe, we are not alone in our fears. Maybe we have access to something so loving, so peaceful, we tend to ignore it because ‘it just can’t be true.’

Or-

Maybe it can.

In my thoughts….

In my thoughts and rambling imagination, a writer often has, I was asked by an old cowboy, sitting next to me at a bar, one of those long wooden bars with a high ceiling you see in cowboy movies, turning his glass of good scotch, listening to me and my fears. He smiled and nodded like He knew what I was going to say before I even started. I finished whatever I was telling Him and we sat quiet for a moment. Then, in one of those semi-deep old grandfather voices, you know the ones, a little guttural but soft and almost soothing in its rhythm, simply asked me-as I remembered it played out in my mind as he looked at me over His shoulder with that grin that launched the world “Do ya trust me?”

I smiled back after a moment. I started to nod my own head. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

Merry Christmas

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About Mark Williams

Mark is the fourth generation of his family to live in the valley.

He attends Open Door Fellowship in Phoenix, Arizona, is widowed after being married for almost thirty-eight years, has three children, and ten grandchildren. He has published eight novels and one non-fiction book.

His idea of the perfect ending to any day is curling up in his comfy bed with a good book and reading until his eyes cross.

www.markjwilliams.com You can read more about the author here.

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