Christmas--the perfect time

I've heard it often this Christmas season.  I've voiced it countless times myself to others, not only this Christmas but in ones' past. It's this difficult reality that the heartaches of life don't cease just because we are moving through a season of merriment.  And it just all seems so wrong...so untimely that grief and loss and sickness and loneliness still exist.  It all feels so out of place.

I find myself in this unique space these last many weeks.   I thoroughly bask in this season of decorating and card-making,Christmas music, gift buying and this year, I confess I am even watching cheesy Hallmark movies. Yes, it's true.   Often times I find myself enjoying these temporal touches of Christmas and then WHAM!  I'm hit with overwhelming sadness.  We aren't spelling it out in black and white but we all know that this is Mom's last Christmas.   How can there not be this overarching sadness?  Mom is weak and tired and unable to throw herself into Christmas as she once did. It breaks my heart to watch this once vibrant woman fading...
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So when someone says to me, "I'm sorry this is happening to you and your family this Christmas, I receive it, having that same sense.

And yet...

Could it be any more timely, then at Christmas?  Not the Hallmark version of Christmas, but the Christmas story...the biblical narrative.  Is there ever a time when we need God to be with us more than now??!!

I have so many friends facing pain and loss that the cumulative sadness is sometimes overwhelming.  And it's Christmas... 

Yes!  Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift of Jesus!!  Oh how we need a Savior!  Oh how we need One who truly knows and understands our sorrow!  Oh how we need a refuge in these harsh winds of life!  Oh how we need Jesus to listen to our pain and speak into our confusion and comfort us in our deep sadness...oh how we need Him!

I will still tell you that, "I'm so very sorry that you are moving through heartache this Christmas".  I am deeply saddened that my own family is walking through the "last" of countless things.  But I will also beckon you to embrace, along with me--not the season, but the One who enters into our less than perfect circumstances this Christmas--at the perfect time.

Advent--The Impossible Made Possible

"Mary believed.  She believed the impossible."  

Nancy De Moss Wolgemuth

This is the season where I am always called upon to reflect on Mary.  It was just an ordinary day for her.  She was engaged to be married and perhaps letting her thoughts run away with the excitement and planning of a new life with Joseph.  But I doubt it was anything other than an ordinary day.  Until the angel appeared and asked her to not only believe the impossible but to also receive the impossible.

"The Holy Spirit will come upon you,

and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;

therefore the child to be born will be called holy--

the Son of God...

For nothing will be impossible with God."

Luke 1:35,37

This call to commitment...saying 'Yes' to being the Lord's servant was going to cost her far beyond anything a woman, a fiance, a wife, a mother, could ever imagine.  Mary was a vessel for the "impossible" gift of Jesus.

And so the question ultimately begs to be asked--

What impossible task might God have for me this season?  Is there something He will require of me to believe which will seem impossible?

I think of Mom instantly.  She is faced with what must feel like the impossible task of letting go of this life and embracing the next.  None of us can fully grasp what this means, until we are faced with its reality.  Mom must enter into this question on her own.

For myself, it feels impossible to imagine walking this road as a family.  Impossible in what suffering we may be asked to bear witness to.  Impossible in what it will be like to watch this once vibrant, flamboyant, energetic, creative woman, slowly be betrayed by an army of cancer cells.  Impossible to imagine watching my Dad say goodbye to his second beloved wife.  Impossible to imagine my siblings and I losing Mom--the one who birthed and/or sacrificially loved and mothered each of us throughout our lives.  It seems impossible--yet with God "all things are possible".

I awoke this morning with anticipation for this first Sunday of Advent, anxious to begin these weeks of reflection and longing for the birth of Christ.  I was "expecting" a more peaceful, comfortable beginning to Advent.  Perhaps much like what Mary was expecting on her ordinary day.  I don't know how the coming days will unfold.  How much time Mom has left is unknown; we only know that treatment is finished...her body unable to handle it.  And so we are moving to the next stage...the last stage...hoping Mom can still "live" out her dying peacefully.  But there are no absolutes, no guarantees.  

"Only" a God who does the impossible.  

Sometimes He does this for us 

and sometimes He accomplishes this in us.
He is

our surety
our promise
our hope--

He will always be 

Emmanuel--

God With Us.