Tag: god

It’s Christmas.

To the commercial world, it’s presents!, parties!, profits!, packages!, and panic!…

To the Christian world, it’s a little baby born King, it’s light in the darkness, it’s the promise of eternal hope. It’s joy.

But joy feels hard right now. Things feel heavy, hearts feel leaden. Tragedy struck in this season of corporately manufactured cheer here in my hometown, and while I’m not close to the ground zero, the shrapnel of devastation has claimed many hearts as targets. The Christian Christmas enters.

It makes no sense. When things don’t make sense, we ask questions. Lots of them. What if? How in the world? Where are you, God? Why God? We ask questions to try to make sense. To manufacture sense. And we can’t, y’all. We can’t. We can’t because it was never supposed to be this way and it’s not supposed to be this way. There was never supposed to be hurt, never supposed to be tragedy, never supposed to be brokenness, never supposed to be a mother and father doubled over in pain of grief, never supposed to be, never supposed to be, never supposed to be…

It’s in Genesis. God created our world in all of it’s beauty and splendor and created man and woman to inhabit it. He gave them good direction with no confusion, no questions. And then, then that snake slithered in, filthy dirty belly worming it’s way into that garden of Eden and I imagine that serpentine body being squiggled into the very form of a question mark when it posed the very first question…”Did God really say?…” That first question–which spiraled in to sin, to confusion, and then to shame, and then to hiding. Hiding from the order, the assuredness, the very good, very perfect original plan.

But then, the Lord, in the middle of that hiding, shame, and sin, called out the second question to the man, “Where are you?” Of course, He already knew, just like the hiding Adam knew deep down in that heart of his, formed from the very dust of the ground that sneaky viper slid across, by the Maker’s very own hands, His very fingerprints still probably molded onto the surface of it. The Lord Himself asked the question that we often ask of Him in the midst of the storm, of the terrible news, of the utter disbelief, in the standing in the middle of the complete mess here on God’s green Earth. Where are you, Lord?

But He never left the building, y’all. Sin entered in, and yet He stayed. He was so committed to His world, His building, His dusty, muddy-hearted people, that he sent a baby to rescue us all. A baby! A completely dependent, weak in form, yet unknowing, toothless wonder. His baby, His only son. The huge monster of sin that leaves destruction everywhere it casts a glance with its serpentine eyes is to be defeated by this one and only son.

And that’s why we have Christmas. Here we are. As the Christian world. To celebrate the Victor who laid in a rock hewn baby bed amidst the stench of animal dung and with his heart beating in the cadence of a conqueror. What Christmas means…

All of that makes my heart full to the brim, yet weightless. I guess that’s where the “my yoke is light” comes in, because soaking up the world around me makes my heart feel like a lead balloon.

When we choose to love someone, we also are choosing to possibly lose someone. It’s not the forefront of choice, but it’s the current reality of this fallen world in which we now live and breathe. It literally pains me to even type those words out as the corners and crevices of my stained muddy heart holds countless, numerous ones I love, ones I never want to lose. Never. The thought makes the next breath hard to come–

because it was never meant to be that way. It was never, never, never, no not even ever meant to be that way. See Eden, see the beginning. There was light. Always light. And that is love. Light is the love. THE Light is never ending, never burns out, never even fades, or flickers. There was order, no confusion, no reason to doubt, no reason to question. By divine design, life was never meant to be lost, love never meant to have pain.

In my feeble and humble prayer and toil for another mother, the only way I could offer any tangible support, I couldn’t help but think of Mary. Mary, who as a young girl was giving birth to a king, The King.

At Christmas, light reentered the world, in the form of a baby. A baby born deity, to live and die for us all. Where the loss of the life was only the beginning of eternal love. Eternal. That’s forever. For ever ever, for eva eva. (I mean, would this be my blog without some sort of musical reference?)

And I imagine Mary did not know all of that, just like that song we sing at Christmastide. She didn’t know all those things her son Jesus would do, didn’t know the miracles he would perform, didn’t know any of it at all, though she pondered things in her heart. I imagine she thought about how much she loved him all the time, how he was something special, how he was a gift from God above and God alone. How His heart was created in her womb, His fingerprints smudged all over the form of it. How she couldn’t imagine her life without him in it. How proud of him she was. How much she loved him.

Sort of how we mothers here feel now, minus that immaculate part and that the baby IS God part…

But I do know what Mary did know, and that was utter, gut-wrenching, soul crushing pain. A love lost here on earth. A pain no mother, no father should ever have to endure. It was never in the original plan.

Thankfully, at Christmas, the original plan was reclaimed. Reclaimed by a baby boy, tender, gentle, and mild. Light born in the midst of a dark, dark world.

And thanks be to God, in the loss of Mary’s son, when it probably felt to her like all the light in the world was gone, especially in her heart, the light was actually being transferred to us all. We now carry that flame inside of us; those who believe. We get the privilege of being light in the darkness with Mary’s baby’s light that lives on within us.

May we choose this Christmas to carry Christ’s light in our hearts, especially in this time that feels so…dark. And then, may we also gather up the light of others that has been left behind for us here on Earth to carry on in this dark, until we all get to light eternal one day, with NO more pain, NO more sorrow, NO more confusion, NO more questioning….well, only one more question there:

For eva eva?

And then the answer: For eva eva!

Thank you, God, for Christmas: reclaiming the original plan. Life eternal is promised.