{"id":5109,"date":"2025-12-16T08:55:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T13:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5109"},"modified":"2025-12-16T08:55:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T13:55:06","slug":"a-christmas-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/16\/a-christmas-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A Christmas Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent \u2013 which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 \u2013 followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God\u2019s own Son into the world. Throughout December we\u2019ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.<\/em>

\u201cI guess I\u2019ll die without being loved.\u201d

So said Pablo Picasso, the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s most celebrated artistic genius, as he neared the end of his life.

The Spanish painter had had plenty of opportunities to experience \u201ctrue love.\u201d He was married twice and collected more mistresses than historians have been able to count.

But his relationships with women were disastrous. Picasso\u2019s mother warned his first wife, \u201cI don\u2019t believe anyone can be happy with my son. He\u2019s available for himself and no one else.\u201d The artist\u2019s friends dismissed him as a ravenous monster. He himself declared, \u201cWhen I die, it will be a shipwreck \u2013 as when a huge ship sinks, many people will be sucked down with it.\u201d

As Os Guinness notes in his book The Call<\/em>, Picasso was right. When he died in 1973 at the age of 91, three of those closest to him took their own lives: his second wife, one of his mistresses, and a grandson. Two other individuals went mad. \u00a0

As Picasso flitted from relationship to relationship like a butterfly sampling flowers, he acknowledged that there were only two kinds of women in his life: goddesses and doormats. After graduating from the first category, every woman he knew would ultimately be condemned to the second.

A devotee of the philosopher Friederick Nietzsche, Picasso embraced the notion that God, or at least the idea of God, was utterly dead and gone. He was heard to mutter, \u201cI am God, I am God.\u201d

In a Parisian caf\u00e9 in 1943, the 61-year-old artist encountered Francoise Gilot, a 21-year-old art student. They began a nine-year-long affair that produced a son and a daughter.

\u201cWomen are machines for suffering,\u201d he told her early on \u2013 not the most romantic pick-up line. \u00a0

On one occasion, he steered Gilot into a church. He guided her towards a dark corner of the sanctuary. \u201cYou\u2019re going to swear here that you will love me forever!\u201d he announced. \u201cWhy here?\u201d she protested. She pointed out that she could make such a commitment anywhere. \u201cBetter here than anywhere else,\u201d he replied. \u201cYou never know. There may be something about all that stuff about churches.\u201d

They both swore their eternal love, then walked away. A few years later their relationship was finished. \u00a0

Guinness points out that Pablo Picasso, the world-famous artist and atheist, was also a human being made in the image of God. Like all of us, he yearned for a life of love and meaning. He painted thousands of portraits of women \u2013 many of them radically distorted \u2013 as he poured out his rage, his disappointment, his self-loathing and callous dismissal of those who could not slake his thirst for happiness.

As bearers of the stamp of God\u2019s own likeness, our hearts cry out for an eternal reference point \u2013 Someone who really will love us forever.

In his desperation to experience such love, what brought Picasso to that church? For just a moment, he intuitively recognized that there had to be something bigger than his own vow and the vow of his mistress.

There is indeed something big enough to satisfy our incurable longing for intimacy and belonging. It\u2019s the love that pervades every aspect of the Christmas Story.

Love, however, isn\u2019t always the first thing people notice when they think of God.

We can discern a great deal about God\u2019s character just by pondering the world around us. In Romans 1:20, for instance, the apostle Paul suggests that in creation \u201cGod\u2019s invisible qualities\u2014his eternal power and divine nature\u2014have been clearly seen.\u201d

But as author and pastor Timothy Keller once noted, there\u2019s one vital aspect of God\u2019s character that comes to us as an astonishing surprise. That would be God\u2019s love.

When we look at humanity\u2019s long and sordid history \u2013 and when we stop long enough to acknowledge our own stunning track records of brokenness \u2013 we would never guess, on our own, that God loves us. How could God possibly keep loving such messed-up people?

God doesn\u2019t leave such issues to guesswork. On the pages of Scripture, he tells <\/u><\/em>us about his love. And in the person of Jesus, he shows<\/u><\/em> us exactly what that means.

\u201cFor God so loved<\/strong><\/em> the world that he gave his only Son\u2026\u201d John 3:16 is rarely celebrated as a Christmas text.

Yet it is.<\/em>

Love is God\u2019s most glorious trait. It should be ours as well.

This Christmas, God might even use us to help someone else realize that they don\u2019t, after all, have to die without being loved.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u00a0Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent \u2013 which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 \u2013 followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God\u2019s own Son into the world. Throughout December we\u2019ll ponder… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119,104,1047],"class_list":["post-5109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas","tag-love","tag-picasso"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5111,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions\/5111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}