In the Bleak mid-winter:

“Yet what can I give him: give my heart”

Written by Jenny Gallimore

“In the Bleak Mid-Winter” poses a challenging question: “What can I give him?”. This could also be asking us, “How do we respond to Jesus?”. The carol also provides us with the answer: “Give him my heart”.

Anyone who knows me at all will know that I am a perfectionist by nature, and so at times can be the (Unofficial) Queen of Anxiety. I worry about anything and everything (and usually about whether I am doing a good enough job of things). I used to worry that I wasn’t “good enough” to be a Christian. The bible seemed to me at the time to have impossibly high standards which I felt I could never live up to. In short, being a Christian seemed to be a tall order. It wasn’t until the Christingle service in 2019 when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks: I don’t have to be perfect. God loves me for who I am, so much so that he sent Jesus to die for me and take the punishment for my sins upon himself. How on earth could I have missed the point of Jesus for so long? I thought I had to achieve some level of perfection, but in reality, I just had to have faith in Jesus and give him my heart.

But what does it mean to give our hearts to Jesus? It could mean a number of things: Accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour, turning away from sin, accepting his way of living, loving and leading our lives. There is nothing that we can do to “earn” our salvation – it is a gift freely given to us; a gift of grace from God because he loves us so much. There is nothing on this Earth that I could possibly give that would repay God for such a gift, and so I choose to give my heart, which is all that God wants from me.