This devotion appears in the 2022 Buckner Advent Guide, containing devotions and family activities to help you celebrate the Advent season. Get your free digital copy of the Advent Guide delivered instantly to your email today.

Anxiety is a word we’re all familiar with. Most likely, it’s a feeling many of us are familiar with as well. According to the ADAA, about 40 million adults in the U.S. suffer from anxiety disorders. This isn’t all that surprising when you think about pressures of social media, rediscovering life after a pandemic, and the political division, war, social injustice and crime on the daily news. There is a lot to feel anxious about. 

But this season, we celebrate because there is peace. Genuine, free, overwhelming peace available to all of us. The peace that comes from the presence of Christ. 

In his book, “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis writes: “God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.” 

We are separated from God by sin, but once we accept his free gift of eternal life and draw near to Him, his peace will be with us. 

Peace is mentioned more than 320 times in the Bible. God knew sin would breed anxiety, fear and worry in the world. That’s why he sent us the most precious gift at Christmas time. The world then wasn’t a stranger to anxiety. They needed peace as badly as we do in 2022.

Think about when Christ was born. An unmarried, pregnant teenager and the man she was engaged to, who wasn’t the father of the baby, were on the road. They were traveling in the days before GPS or smart phones, with only a donkey for transport. When they stopped for the night, they couldn’t even get a hotel room.

There was no room at the inn for the very pregnant, soon-to-deliver, mother of Jesus. The Bible doesn’t tell us if Mary and Joseph were anxious, but how could they not be? What perfect timing when, in the midst of chaos, in a lowly manger, the Prince of Peace entered the world.   

Jesus was born not to rid the world of all the things that cause anxiety and unrest, but to save us from our sins so we can live more fully in him and in his peace. Let’s rest in that peace today. 

Written by Morgan Russell, associate director of marketing for foster care and adoption for Buckner International.