I grieve every Christmas. I miss my father the most this time of year. He passed away right before Thanksgiving four years ago. The grief always seemed so out of place with Christmas fast approaching. But this year I know different.
I believed it was somehow ungrateful to approach Christmas and the gift of a Savior and King with anything less than unbridled joy. It seemed cheap and flimsy to admit that in the merriment and festivities there was an ache and a void.
It seemed wrong to say that although I worship a God who would humble himself and abandon heaven to come small and poor and weak to give me life, I still feel small and poor and weak in my life.
It’s as if I was rejecting the gift of Jesus when I could still feel the sharp edges of this broken world pressing in.
I want the Kingdom promised. I want to see it poured out in more than tidily wrapped gifts and strung bows, hymns on bowed lips, and the warmth and flicker of our fireplace. I want it to be more than obligation and striving, pretense and comfort.
I want it to be soul rest and peace and shalom in the places where hearts are rend and weary, depressed and lonely. I want to see a world met, songs sung in every tongue, and no one cold. And it’s not that, not yet.
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