In an interview, Stephen Colbert once said when reflecting on loss in his life, “It is a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering. There is no escaping that. If you are grateful for your life, then you need to be grateful for all of it, you can’t pick and choose.”

If I’m honest, the majority of the time I want to be grateful for some if not most of my life, but not all of it. During the Christmas season, we are surrounded by images of the "perfect" Christmas, cozy fires, happy families, a general abundance of presents and food. I want to thank God for the good parts, the answered prayers, the open doors, and the moments of joy. But there are other parts I’m sure you can relate to wanting to edit out. The empty chair at the table, the family dynamics, not having enough money for that turkey or even presents, or the losses you still don't understand. We want the gift of the Manger without the reality of the broken world Jesus was born into.

James 1:2-4 doesn’t ask us to pretend that trials are pleasant. It doesn't say "feel happy" about pain, it says to "consider it pure joy." This suggests that the difficulties we face aren't just obstacles to our faith, they are the very things that strengthen it. The "testing" isn't meant to break us, but to produce a perseverance that makes us "mature and complete." Hard things tend to make us better.

This is the hidden side of the Christmas story. We celebrate the birth, but we often forget the "trials of many kinds" surrounding it. An unplanned pregnancy, a long journey on a donkey, a cold stable because there was no room in the inn, and a journey to Egypt to escape a king’s jealousy. God didn't pave a smooth, golden road for the arrival of His Son. He worked through the mess, the displacement, and the struggle.

Gratitude for "all of it" is really an act of surrender. It sounds like this, “Lord, I don’t understand this part of my story. I wouldn’t have written it this way. But I’m choosing to believe that You are using this trial to finish a work in me that I couldn't complete on my own.” That’s not shallow positivity, that’s the faith of Mary and Joseph. It’s shifting our focus from trying to control our circumstances to trusting the One who entered into our circumstances.

The cross remains our clearest reminder of this. Jesus didn’t receive only the pleasant parts of existence, He stepped into the full reality of a broken world, including suffering, injustice, and death. The worst thing that ever happened became the preview to the best gift ever offered. If God could bring redemption out of that, then He is able to work redemptively in the parts of our story we least understand.

Maybe there’s a chapter of your life right now you’d happily skip if you could. A disappointment, a loss, or a situation you never asked for. This Christmas, what would it look like not to be grateful for the trial itself, but to be grateful for what God is producing through it?