December 2020

This isn't my finest writing, nor is it a guarantee that "I'm back." It's just something I needed to work out and put somewhere. Maybe it will mean something to someone at the end of this grim year.

Every Advent when I was a child my dad would lead my family through a devotional entitled “Advent Foretold.” Each night after dinner we would gather in the living room, Dad enthroned on his big blue reading chair, we kids sprawled out in various spots on the floor, mom nestling into the couch with whoever was the baby at the time. Dad would distribute photocopies of the picture accompanying that night’s lesson -- simple black and white line drawings which we kids could color in while Dad read. 

Each nightly installment of “Advent Foretold” focused on one Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah and His coming. The book highlighted how statistically unlikely it was that any of those promises, much less all of them, would be fulfilled -- and yet, they were. Over centuries God made a string of bold promises to humankind, and He made good on them, but only after years of waiting.

I knew before I knew. I knew in the core of me before I could have identified and articulated it, that Christmas only comes after a season of bittersweet. Advent culminates in celebration, yes, but it is longing. It is the deep, guttural expression of “the hopes and fears of all the years,” the heartbreak and dead-ended dreams that nag us. 

My favorite Christmas carol for as long as I can remember has been “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I've been thinking lately about how absurd it is that a little child with nothing to grieve yet would set her heart upon that slow, dirge-like song as her favorite. Rather than being filled with tinsel and angels and saccharine manger scenes, the lyrics are a recitation of everything wrong with the world, everything that plagues our human existence. 

Captivity.

Mourning.

Exile.

Tyranny.

Hell.

The grave.

Gloom.

Darkness.

Misery.

As a little one I was drawn to this song because there was something different about it. I noticed how the melody made my heart hurt and reach out for something beyond what I could see. I noticed how even as the song exhorted us to rejoice, it was sad, and it was honest about being sad.

This year as the world around me celebrates the birth of one particular Child long ago, my back is weary from the heavy burden of grief over the miscarriage of my first child. As we celebrate the miracle of Mary’s swelling womb I weep bitterly over the emptiness of mine. As we sing glowingly of a manger in Bethlehem I can’t stop thinking about how I should have been entering my final trimester right now, preparing a crib for my own baby. My heart rages in a fresh way against the tyranny of death, against how cosmically wrong it is that the curse can reach even into these most tender and wonderful places.

Is there a place for my grief in this time of celebration? What do I do with it? Can God hear it? Does He care? 

I understand now that those childhood nights spent sprawled on the living room floor coloring in prophets’ flowing robes prepared me for this. They taught me that God has always welcomed His people’s full-throated longing, that He has always heard it, that He has always had a plan to satisfy it, even if that satisfaction didn’t come quickly. They taught me that I am part of a family tree made up of people who took their doubts, longings, and bitter disappointments to a God who was willing to hear all that brutal honesty because He desired intimacy with them. They taught me that this season is meant for lament, it is meant for gathering up all of our grief into our hands and showing it to God, saying, “Look at this mess. Help. Come. I’m waiting. Help.” As the world around us urges a contrived, vague sense of holly-jollyness, the most appropriate thing we can do is actually to not stifle our longing, but rather to lean into that list of cosmic wrongs. Let out the guttural cry. Let the tears of disappointment flow. These are signs of life; these are signs of our hearts being awake to the reality of our need, and therefore awake to the gift that His presence is. 

God is listening, and He is weeping with us. He wept over Jerusalem, tears of lament and longing for His children, even as He knew how He would deliver them. I don’t know if His plan of restoration for me will include a living, breathing, fully-formed child; I’m not promised that. But I am promised that He hears, and I am assured that it is safe to simply be honest about being sad this year. It will make the eventual celebration -- which will come, in time, as it always does -- more complete.