Years ago, after my husband and I had come out of a chaotic season and were finally enjoying a little more calm, I asked my counselor, “Why do I still feel so tired?” Our kids were sleeping through the night. I was able to exercise somewhat regularly. I finally got back into my cooking routine (for the most part, anyway). We were no longer functioning in survival mode.

But I was still completely exhausted.

“It’s like you just ran a marathon. At the end of a marathon, you’re still tired,” my counselor told me.

Duh. I should have known this. But sometimes you need to pay a therapist to remind you of the obvious.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I went to see a play based on C.S. Lewis's (very trippy and often confusing but still profound) book, The Great Divorce. The script and the acting brought truths to light in a way I can easily miss while reading the book.

At one point, I had to pull out my phone to type out this line so I could hold onto it and ruminate over it a little longer:

“Either joy prevails or misery infects it.”

I've been turning that phrase over in my mind for the last week, and I looked up the full quote in Lewis's book. Here, the narrator's guide is leading the narrator around the outskirts of a sort of celestial space and explaining the meaning of what they're seeing. The guide says:

“Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”

There's so much to dig into there, and so much in the context of the book that's worth reading. But here's the simple truth I want us to hold onto: Joy will prevail.

It’s been a harder, stranger year than many of us expected. Maybe we’re entering the Christmas season exhausted and weary. Maybe we’re excited to have something to celebrate. But whatever you’re feeling, my guess is that we could all use a little hope.

This gift guide is meant to help with that.

From sweatshirts reminding us that the weary world can rejoice to shelves to display plants that bring life into our homes, each product in some way is meant help encourage, inspire, or refresh the recipient.

Purchasing these products will also help the people who make them. Aside from the books, each item comes from a small business–and even with the books, you can purchase from Bookshop.org instead of Amazon to support local bookstores. Several items also support meaningful causes like helping human trafficking victims, small family-run coffee farms, or local families in need of food.

The poet, Christian Wiman, writes, “Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred.”

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Only a few days remain in the year, and I stand singing on a Sunday morning.

This world is a weary place, brokenness marks every face.
Dear ones are lost and bodies languish, divisions drive our souls to anguish.
Injustice mingles with the soil, we eat the bread of anxious toil.
Hear our cries, show us favor, we need hope, we need a Savior.

My voice trembles, and I feel my jaw tighten. The notes ring in my ear, but not as loudly as the words. Weary. Brokenness. Injustice. Anxious. I hear those words scrape at my soul, tearing away at the armor I clothed it in when I stepped into the church.

We need hope. I fumble through that last line and try to blink back the emotion flooding my face. The voices around me carry the lyrics I can’t seem to say. It seems a fitting way to end a hard year—a song of desperation sung with a shaking voice, a few tears, and a community who cries out with me.