Hello my dear friends and welcome to a special Christmas edition of Unshaken.

I'm Jared Halverson and I'm so grateful that we can spend time together in the scriptures.

I just got off of a Zoom call with 200 incredible missionaries in the Texas

Houston South mission. It was an amazing experience to be able to feel of their

spirit and try to share some things that might buoy them up during this holiday season.

And I pray for a similar spirit in what I'm hoping to give to each of you today,

a Christmas gift of sorts.

One that is kind of like the ones that as parents they always say they prefer so I'm hoping that holds true here

It's the homemade kind and not a lot of professional Polish but just you me and the scriptures trying to make sense of what I consider the most important

word of Christmas. And that word is condescension. My hope is that as we talk about that word today, that it becomes synonymous with Christmas for you, from this Christmas forward.

The word itself is pretty simple to take apart and put back together.

Condescension, the con prefix means with.

If you're a Spanish speaker, con is with.

If you're Portuguese, com is with.

And then descend, we know, means to come down or to go down.

So to condescend means to come down with us.

In the Savior's case, in order to be like us,

so that then a new word there could be a con

ascension that we could rise with him to become more like him because of all that

he's done for us. Now to me, the reason that Christmas and condescension are synonymous terms

comes from an experience that Nefai had when he was trying to make sense of his father's dream,

of the vision of the tree of life. I want you to

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