The aroma of cinnamon and vanilla wafting from the oven... carols playing softly in the background...Christmas trees decked up in red, gold, and silver lights.
The Christmas season can really feel like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” as the lyrics of the Andy Williams classic go.
Even as my heart warms in this beautiful season, I am reminded of a very different Christmas several years ago. I had lost my father in November that year in what was my first real brush with the utter devastation that death brings. The Christmas season that followed felt unbearably heavy, and tears were my closest friend. It hurt to see a world busy celebrating a festive season when my heart was searing with irreplaceable loss.
Neither my upbringing nor my father was perfect. Yet, I deeply cherished my relationship with him and the times we spent together. His memories flooded my mind constantly during those months. The warm hugs, the fatherly advice, belting out awfully out-of-tune songs together during times of family prayer, small, thoughtful acts of love that he would surprise the family with, and our dreams and hopes for the future. Then suddenly, death had taken away everything that was.
Somewhere inside my heart, the hope of seeing my father again lingered. I knew that God had promised to restore far more than what death had taken. I knew that Christ’s deep comfort promised to heal my pain and that grief would feel different with time. But in that season, I simply could not see beyond my grief. I felt like it would drown me. That Christmas felt like one where people like me had no belonging.
Maybe this year, death has taken from you, too. Maybe the pangs of grief and loss feel overwhelmingly insurmountable. Or maybe it’s the death of a relationship or a dream you’ve been begging God for. It is okay to cry. It is okay if the tree or the star doesn’t come out. It is okay to grieve. But be comforted, just as I was, that the real Christmas is for the grieving.
The real Christmas is, in fact, rooted in God’s most unreserved plunge into the depths of human grief. The grief of a young Mary having her world turned upside down, the harshness of poverty in a cattle manger that welcomed God in the flesh, the senseless mass violence that erupted over King Herod’s bid to kill the baby Jesus. Yet most of all, the unfathomable sorrow of God the Father giving up his immortal Son to human mortality, to the gruesomeness of death. The very life of Jesus, as Scripture reminds us, was that he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). No one understands our grief better than Christ does.
Jesus came not just to feel our grief but to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. And in doing so, he offers us comfort in our grief and ultimately healing from it. We can find hope in knowing that Christ bore our deepest, darkest night on the cross to break the cruel bonds of sin. Christ died so that death would die its final death. In our mourning, we can rest in the arms of the One who heals the broken-hearted and binds up our wounds (Psalm 147:3).
Christmas is most precious to those who drink from its fountain of hope in the midst of their grief. If this Christmas feels blue, may Jesus hold and comfort you.
Photo by Laura Hope on Unsplash
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