Messy Christmas Musings

This one's for all of us having a hard time finding their holiday spirit

I don't know about you, but it just doesn't feel like Christmas to me right now.

I've kept waiting for the merriment of a season that I normally love so dearly to catch up with me, but this year, it's felt like chasing ghosts. I've hung the lights, baked the sweets, wrapped the gifts, but for some reason, it all feels hollow, and I can't quite put my finger on why that might be. In fact, this evening as we were preparing to head to church for our candlelight Christmas Eve service, my husband remarked to me that it all feels a bit...forced this year.

Forced is a good word for it, I think.

Because for so many of us, Christmas is synonymous with joy, with awe, with light and hope. It's a celebration of the best gift we've ever been given -- the reminder that God has not loved us from a distance. It is good news, a reminder that we are always loved and never alone.

I believe it; I really do. And so I've spent this Advent season waiting: waiting for the joy to come, waiting for the wonder, waiting to feel light in spirit and full of hope. And now, Christmas Eve has come, and a large piece of me still feels like it's waiting.

Which makes me think of something my friend Heidi recently wrote about, and that is that Christmas always comes, whether we're ready for it or not. That's the miracle of it all. God loves, and God saves because that's simply who God is, and none of it depends on us in the slightest.

God doesn't wait for perfect circumstances to come to us; the baby in a filthy feeding trough in a small city under occupied Roman rule attests to this. God doesn't wait for us to have it all together; the unwed teen mother, belly round with the life she would soon deliver in a city miles from home, attests to this. It makes me think of labor, of the thin space between love and pain, of the locus of new life that exists so far beyond a mother's control. I'm sure that Bethlehem was the last place Mary wanted her contractions to start. She wasn't ready. I remember labor starting with my son on a Sunday night; he was not born until Wednesday morning. I was beyond ready.

Perhaps our readiness has nothing to do with it.

And the thing is -- when we don't get to choose when we are or are not ready -- things might get a little bit messy. Even Christmas. See, we like our Christmas all bright and shiny and wrapped up with pretty bows. We like to feel we have it all together, internally and externally. But sometimes, Christmas just shows up, and lays our well-intentioned plans and checklists to pieces.

Like tonight, at our Christmas Eve service.

It was loud. It was messy. Maybe it even looked a bit chaotic from the outside. We had nearly a dozen kids in worship, which comes with its fair share of chattering and rustling and singing and thump-thumping up and down the aisles. Crumbs from cookies that were handed out during the children's sermon littered the carpet. Several people had colds, judging from all the coughs and sneezes that sprung up around the sanctuary. The slideshow was delayed. My son sang his heart out to Silent Night in only the way an eight-year-old boy can, in that sort of melodic yelling voice that might be endearing if it weren't so loud.

And there were three from our family there tonight -- not four. This is our new normal. The grief from that at times feels so heavy that it could crush me.

Yet still:

God was there. Not despite the mess, but in it. In the chubby cheeks and sticky fingers of children. In a table to welcome visitors. In the masks people wore to protect their neighbors, and the crescendo of off-key voices joined together in worship. In the blankets handed out for people to wrap around them to fight off the chill in the air because our sanctuary is often drafty.

No, it wasn't perfect. It wasn't a "traditional" Christmas Eve by any means.

But God was there, I think maybe doing a new thing, in the midst of a messy, imperfect people gathered together. God was there, I think in unexpected moments and places, reminding us that nothing we can do or not do can affect our belovedness. God was there, I think, as a child, bringing laughter and joy to all of us, as a father, embracing us all in the crook of his arm.

God was there, I think, as a mother, bearing us in her womb, letting we daughters without our mothers and we mothers without our daughters shake with grief as she held us.

Christmas is here, and I wonder if I'll feel ready at all. And so I suppose I've written this for all of you who may be feeling the same, to let you know, if nothing else, you are not alone in your waiting.

Love is here for us, too -- whether or not we're ready for it. When we're ready for it.
And that, perhaps, is the gift.

xo,