Imagine: you’ve made a choice that will change the course of your life forever. What lies behind is a life you can’t go back to or be content in, so you have chosen to leave it. If caught, you would be severely punished, and yet the future you venture towards is vastly uncertain and unknown.

In many ways, this analogy applies to the Christian walk: being saved by grace and living righteously will require us to step on to a different path. Becoming sanctified by the Lord will mean leaving our old lifestyles, haunts, and routines in order to make new ones that glorify God. In doing so, we may find that those we once called friends no longer understand us and shun us. We may find things that once gave us comfort, don’t anymore.

When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.