Notes on Christmas: Making Space

I used to think the innkeeper in the Christmas story was the villain.

No one ever told me that, but through the years I think I secretly just thought “What a rotten dude! He couldn’t give a pregnant woman a bed?”

At some points I pictured him as this indifferent guy who shrugged and was like “Yeah, that’s too bad.” Sometimes I imagined him as this weak old man who should have kicked his other guests out. Often I imagined him as this mean guy who said something like “Just go sleep in the barn because I don’t have time for sad stories.”

For whatever reason, I seemed to forget Herod was out there wreaking havoc. I was just full on outraged with this innkeeper. I thought he could have done something, really anything. Like sir, you could go sleep with your cows and give the woman your room!

But the reality is, I have no idea what the innkeeper was like. Maybe he was in a tight spot and gave what he had. Maybe he went to sleep on the floor feeling guilty. Maybe he had already given up his room and was sleeping on the roof with cats.

But this year, I’ve been shouldering this deep sense that I’m the innkeeper. Joy to the World keeps instructing me to “prepare him room” and I’m scrambling to make a place.

In the middle of folding laundry, here’s some room. While I’m washing bottles and towels, here’s some room. While I’m falling asleep with milk on my shirt and unwashed hair, here’s some room.

In the Christmas season as a new and working mom, sometimes I feel like I’m giving the Savior of the world my messiest place.

But the thought kept occurring to me God never wrote a bad thing about the innkeeper. He could have totally made space to say something like “that selfish man maketh no room and therefore I do not liketh him” or whatever fits (clearly, something better than that). But there’s actually no innkeeper mentioned. For all I know, there was no innkeeper driving them away. Maybe there was just simply no room and they figured it out on their own. Maybe I’ve been mad at a guy that doesn’t exist at all.

But someone had a barn. Maybe it was the innkeeper, maybe it was some guy who saw them walking his way. The point is that someone made room and God never wrote the story to sound like it wasn’t good enough. Jesus came in the place that was available. He used whatever space had been made.

This year, I’m holding on to the truth that he comes in the middle of unglamorous things. In the middle of diaper changes. When the dishes are piled and prayers are mumbled in the last moments of the day.

I’m making room in the spaces between naps and in the pauses in projects, in moments when I have just a second of silence alone.

Because preparing him room doesn’t mean you need a castle, or a Balsam Hill tree (because who can actually afford those monstrous things?) He just needs an invitation for a place to stay. He comes in the mess, in the exhausted moments, amidst the busy holiday plans, next to the tree with burned out bulbs and the cookies you forgot to bake.

He doesn’t despise the innkeeper. He doesn’t despise invitations that feel small and unworthy, fragments and pieces that we offer throughout the day. There’s grace for the weary, for the moments when you only have the energy to whisper his name.

I’m sorry to the innkeeper, or the barn owner, or whoever gave them a space. You made a place for a miracle and it was enough. I’m still learning the invitation itself is more important than the place.

What I Lost in the Fire (Notes for When Your Faith Goes Up in Flames)

I had an ad in my e-mail this morning for a sale on jackets. One of the highlighted reviews said “If my house catches on fire, I’m grabbing this jacket and then my boyfriend….”

The whole ad was a little ridiculous, but I started thinking about my friend who is figuring out her faith. She’s trying to sort out where it all went wrong and if most of it was ever even right. Sometimes our house of belief catches fire and we have to decide what, if anything, we should take.

It took me back to one of my most challenging seasons in my faith. I had just taken a new job and moved to a new city. In a few weeks the whole experience became a little ember that set a whole host of things ablaze.

I remember driving to work every day, listening to the same song and crying. The words that I just kept singing out were “I don’t know how to be yours”. I would sob at the reality that I was drowning in failed expectations, trauma, grief, and I didn’t know how to belong to God in that. He would say that he loved me, but I just didn’t know how to be with him in the middle of something that seemed to prove otherwise.

When it all caught fire I had to walk away from that job. I was stuck in a new city during a pandemic, completely lost on how to move forward. I had to decide what to grab while running out of that fire. The truth is, there were mornings when I would sit on the edge of my bed and think I don’t want to take any of it. I’m not sure any of it is worth saving.

I still believed in God. I knew I would always believe in him, I had seen too much to do otherwise. But I didn’t know if I could hold on to a lot of other things people had handed me in His name. Was the God I loved even who I even thought he was? Or was the God I knew a collage of ideas and concepts other people had painted?

It was all starting to burn and I was starting to think maybe everything needed to. Where had most of it gotten me anyway?

The good got me out. I didn’t see it at the time, couldn’t fully stop to assess the situation in the middle of the flames. But the good parts, the parts of my faith that were real and true, were the things that pushed me to even walk out of the fire. The good things deep in my foundation caused me to stop and care that it was happening and to even ask the question of “what do I save?” 

Something inside of me knew that some of it had to hold value. Because people without valuables wouldn’t stop to ask the question–they would walk out and let it all burn. It’s in the pause, the questioning, the wrestling and panic that you usually realize there are things worth keeping. Maybe it is not as much as you expected, but there are probably a few things you know your soul needs to take.

I didn’t know how to be His. I didn’t know how to belong to this God who seemed to be breaking my heart. But if there was the option to be His, even in the loss of everything else, I had to grab onto one truth: there is no one else worth belonging to.

A lot of other things I had been keeping burned up in that fire. The optimistic sense that “we’re all on the same team” crumbled for me. I accepted that there were people setting fires to the faith that weren’t on my team, weren’t on God’s team, didn’t care whose houses they had helped destroy. I accepted that it wasn’t my job to change them.

I let the belief that I had to be the one to “save the church” burn. I let many of the ideas people in church had fed me go up in flames. Even though so much felt like a waste,  I had to clench and keep the feeble faith of when I first came to God. That deep prayer of, “I can’t do it on my own and the man who chose a cross is the only one who saves”. 

I don’t hold or parade elaborate doctrine anymore. Yes, I still believe the Bible and the foundations of the Christian faith. I think “church” has a beautiful and rightful place. But sometimes that’s as elaborate as I go. I no longer go around trying to convince people (or myself) that God’s love hinges on our ability to swallow man-made interpretations of Him. There are things we just shouldn’t swallow or try to hold down. There are things we just can’t survive on. 

Jesus showed us that religion, the kind of religion filled with greed and power players, will eventually starve us. He never expected us to feast on organizations, gorge on programs, digest celebrity leaders, be nourished by religious trends.

So, I grabbed the good and ran. It was just the very basic truth of salvation, that was all I was really sure of. I thought I would be sad to see the rest go. But when the flames scorched it all, I sighed at the lightness I felt in not having to live with the chaos anymore. 

There’s a way to live with less. Sometimes I think it’s the only way to live.

Some days, I am still sorting through the survival stage that comes after the blaze. It often feels weak to be holding so few things. But God asks for children, not scholars, influencers, politicians, or “ministry trained”. He doesn’t need our sermon notes, commentary research, agenda for church growth, marketing projections, plans to save the human race. He wants children, dependent and needy, fulfilled in giving up the homes we built with hollow religion, and surrendered to letting them go up in flames.

Someday They’re Gone

We buried my grandmother in December. 

It’s hard and blunt way to begin a post, but in a world where people are moving fast and always speeding to the next thing, I wanted to start with why any of this matters.

In the months leading up to her death, I noticed that I was desperate to take everything in. The details of stories she had told me a million times, her favorite breakfast foods, the color of her furniture, even the pieces of advice I’d ignored because I thought them outdated; at the end, I wanted to remember it all.

By then, I’d learned from my experience with my other grandparents that eventually much of it would begin to fade. I wanted to grab as much of it in full color as possible and hold on. She wasn’t perfect, but she was special. As she grew in years, she gained a lot of perspective, and I wanted to learn from her experience, even if I didn’t understand it.

I distinctly remember one day, well into her terminal diagnosis, we sat in her living room with the doors and windows open. She always loved the fresh air moving through the house. As we all sat enjoying the breeze, she broke the silence with words I’ve gripped. “Fall has always been my favorite season,” she sighed, her voice shaky “you would think it would be spring, but no, it’s still fall”.

She wanted us to know she still saw beauty in the season of death, even when she lived in the tension of its pain. 

In that moment, I wished I had absorbed more of her words throughout my life. There must have been so much I missed along the way.

I find that in the months since her passing, I drink in words of elders in ways that I wouldn’t before.

Even when they infuriate me, confuse me, raise every sound argument laid in the marrow of my bones.

Because someday they’ll be gone and with them, the mystery of things they discovered that I can’t uncover. With them, their wisdom, sometimes lost in semantics that might outrage my youth, but things that were gained in their years of experience and trials that I haven’t earned or attained quite yet.

Years do not always make them right, but they give me less time to find out. And someday we’ll look back and realize that maybe we should have just taken in more, argued and tuned out a little less. There will likely be time to sort it out for ourselves later, but until then, sometimes you just love them, hear them, hold them. When they’re gone you’ll be thankful for the time you spent appreciating the good, not trying to do it on your own, and giving them space to tell you what they’ve learned in the time they’ve had. 

The Light Comes

I knew a lot about boys meeting me at coffee shops.

I knew very little about men showing up early to buy me coffee.

A year ago, I was anticipating a speech that didn’t happen. I was well-equipped to find myself across from a boy telling me a bunch of half-hearted excuses. I could have put on my resume, “PhD in Define the Relationship Conversations”

What I never saw coming was showing up to a fresh cup of black coffee waiting for me, and a moment that changed my life. The brief pause and then the image I’ll never forget: Matthew sat straight up in his plaid blue shirt and said “We’re probably going to get married”. Whoever that stranger was sitting across from us in that coffee shop will probably tell that story to his grandchildren: the crazy lady who just sat there with a paper cup over her face. Her other hand stuck straight out, poised to burst out singing “Stop in the Name of Love”. 

It was one of the only times that Matthew has ever seen me completely speechless. 

Because I was there to have the first “what-is-going-on-between us” conversation. Clearly, he had passed Go, collected $200, and had the rest of the game plan.

Welcome to the beginning of our lives together. He’s eight miles down the road and I’m back here drawing circles on the map. Yet, somehow we got to the same place at the same time—that’s one way that I know God is real.

Miraculously, we navigated through that. I managed to choke out some questions that he steadily answered. We then went on to have what will go down in history as the most hilarious, unconventional, remarkable relationship of its kind. 

“The light comes at the right time”

I heard that phrase the other day when thinking about how Matthew and I had been friends for a while before we started dating. Back when we first met, I never thought we’d end up here. 

I was going on bad dates, whining, and thinking that I was going to be single until eternity.

The light just came. On a Saturday afternoon in a TJ Maxx, after Matthew and I had gotten in a fight. I stood there realizing that maybe I was officially a complete moron for trying divert him from liking me. I knew he was interested and I was trying to derail that train. It was all for completely illogical reasons that sounded brilliant in my own mind, of course.

And I’ll never really know why, on that particular day, after all those months that it just hit me. Instead of trying to convince every other woman I met that he was “such a catch”, I had to get my act together and figure out how to make sure I could still catch him. I knew if a man existed that could stand up to me and then be kind, humble, sincerely apologetic, and actually still like me, I should get over my illogical brilliance.

So I got my act together and ended up at that coffee shop, getting more than I bargained for in that store. Thank God.

The light comes at the right time. 

I’ve been hanging onto those words in this season, in a time when things are heavy. I have been remembering that lesson when it sometimes seems like God isn’t moving very fast on what we’re praying for, or doing exactly what we think we need. But if we’re open, His light comes and it works on our hearts to align us with a plan that humbles us, embraces us, asks us to open our hearts up.  I’m still learning in a thousand different ways, the light comes—and it shows us things we couldn’t see before, how God was always working, always on time, always for us. 

Letting Go of the Dead Things

When I crossed the state line into Georgia, my backseat packed with everything I owned, I dialed the number of the soon-to-be roommates I barely knew.

My chest pounding, I was choking on sobs, gasping for breath. 

I no longer wanted to be the person I had been.

Those girls prayed me through the rest of the drive to the house that would soon become my home.

All throughout that drive the words of a man I barely knew weighed heavily on my mind, “Whatever you do next, choose life.”

A warning, a calling, a word that would never leave my mind.

It changed the course of everything, because all I had known in the season beforehand was choosing everything else. 

Those next few years, life bloomed around me and I saw what it meant to make that choice and to live fully. Those girls who prayed me home became my closest friends. I still talk to them weekly, and we still pray each other into places of life when we can’t catch our breath.

I think about those words often, and what my life might have been if I hadn’t heard them or hadn’t obeyed.

I might have gone other places entirely, lost my way, lived with a permanently broken heart. I might have married the wrong man, never forgiven, never learned how to stand up for the right things.

But sometimes I step back into dead places and I choose the wrong things. Still, I stumble back into worlds of wanting to choose complacency and comfort. There are times when the process of “choosing life” seems painful and intimidating.

Because there are times when “life” means digging, upheaval, uprooting, re-planting. It means the loss of things that I’m not quite ready to grieve.

Life, if I choose it, may just mean the removal of something I once loved, that once fed me. It may also mean the acceptance of failure; that I have to dig up things that didn’t grow like I once dreamed.

“There’s a time to let go.”

When I first got to Georgia, someone told me those words when I asked him how to bear the weight of the pain I was carrying. He read verses in Ecclesiastes to me and then sighed, “If there’s a time for everything, I suspect there’s a time to let go.”

After that, he would spend months trying to convince me to cut ties with someone he knew was still pulling strings behind the scenes.

Now I know what he was really saying was: “choose life”. Choose to let go of the dead things.

I couldn’t see it, but he saw it. I finally see it now. I drug the dead weight across those state lines; my arms were screaming in pain, my heart and limbs crying out for relief. 

But still, I would go on to spend summers after making promises I couldn’t keep, and letting those same hands pull the strings that entangled me.

I didn’t know then, but I know now, life is the choice we get to make when the soil is hard, the plant is withered, the roots brittle and there’s nothing firm left to keep it living.

We can choose to sit with the dead, the brittle, the withered, the thing that will never feed us again. Or we can start over and choose life. Though it might hurt to dig it up and start from the beginning, if we choose life, we have a chance to hold, to share, something full and beautiful again.

There is Room For You

I was a challenging child at times.

Mostly, my parents nurtured my strong will, until at my mother’s dismay it confronted her like a bull in a china shop during one of our church’s Christmas pageants.

Ironically dressed like an angel, I stood ready to take my place and demanded to carry my noticeably-sized toy puppy onto the stage.

She contended and begged, but I held my ground. As the time drew closer, she knew the child she had birthed. She knew that me and that puppy were a packaged deal. 

The crowed roared as I toddled my way down the aisle and onto the stage, entirely unashamed that I was bringing a beagle to the manager scene.

I recited my verses brilliantly, sang all the hymns on cue, and it all went off without a hitch, at least on my part (as for the other kids, I can’t tell you how they did).

Later that day, I remember both of my parents laughing about the dog, my dad (the pastor) seemingly amused and grateful for a wife that could shrug off her child bringing a plastic puppy to the miraculous birth of the Christ child.

We watched the video tape recording together for years after and all of us laughed and imagined that maybe puppies or animals we’d never suspected showed up that night. 

He lets us come.

If there’s one valuable thing my parent’s gave me that day, it’s that you can come with whatever you’re holding. 

He wasn’t born in a high-up tower or a closed-off room. It didn’t take a password, visitor’s pass or keycard to get in the door. He was born in a stable, with a star that led right up to the door. A place where strangers and friends, lowly shepherds and wealthy kings could kneel before Him; where dusty animals could freely come and rest their head.

He lets us come. 

But let’s not forget that we only get to because He came first, and He still does. Maybe you’re thinking that there’s no manger for you to travel to and it’s just not as easy as it was then. Because it’s hard when you can’t see Him and there’s no clear star pointing you the right way…know that He still comes. He comes in the silent night and in the joy to the world, and He is everywhere if you’re willing to just look up. Just ask Him to show you the light. If you’re willing to follow when you see it, even if you’re not sure exactly where it’s going to lead, you will find Him.

He lets us come. 

And it’s in our coming that we find that there is no where else worth being. Not only at Christmas, but every other day. Because there’s nowhere else that invites us in so openly, that gives us all an equal place. Nowhere else that makes a space for us to come and see a miracle and doesn’t ask us to hashtag it or pay for VIP seating. It’s a place where little girls can bring their puppies, mother’s can let the pressure to be perfect go, and men carrying the weight of the world can unburden their tired shoulders. It’s where joy to the world isn’t just a song on the radio and silent nights don’t make us feel so alone.

It’s a place where you can bring whatever you’re holding, even if no one else seems to be carrying that and even if it’s something the storybooks don’t show. Though the world made little room for Him, He made sure to make some for us. There is room where He is, room for you, room for me, room for the whole world He came to love.

The Expectations of Love and Getting Married

I’ll never really know what people expected of me, I think that’s where I have to start. Some probably thought I’d be the calculated type to spend years evaluating the ins and outs of a relationship, examining the nooks and crannies of every part. Sometimes I think that’s what I expected of myself—to logically pick apart every single piece until there was no question unanswered and no mystery unsolved.

But if I’m honest, I think I always knew that God would have another plan. Because I’ve always known that God is not a puzzle to be solved or love a code to be cracked. So when the right thing finally came, I knew the goal wasn’t to figure every equation out, solve the man in front of me and explain all the things inside of myself. 

As much as I wanted to reason and untangle my way through it, add it up, subtract it down, and understand all of the pieces of every single part of the reality of what it our relationship would mean—love is not a formula. When God gives it to us, it’s a gift, and having God forever in that process is the only successful factor to it. 

I knew quickly Matthew was who I wanted to marry, it was that simple.

Not because it sounded easy, or just plain fun, but because he looks at me and loves me how Jesus has my entire life—selflessly and with grace. And I want to do the same for him.

It didn’t mean that I wasn’t terrified, didn’t have questions, wasn’t asking God for direction. Because I felt and did all of those things, but Jesus being the source of love is what changes everything.

There are a million other factors that will enter into the equation, but none of them will cancel out reality, none of them will equal to or overpower the truth that Jesus came first, comes first, and will come first. It made all the difference, makes all the difference, changes all of the questions and answers. No matter the timeline, past, future, present, or expectation of things—that changes everything.

That’s the thing I would’ve told myself years ago, prepared myself with before I got to this stage. That you can’t examine and talk yourself into anything and you can’t set different expectations up because Jesus changes everything. When God shows up with the love He wants to give, just open your hands and receive it, go with it and whisper prayers of gratitude because it’s better than all the years you spent trying to grab onto your own other things.

All the years I spent trying to examine, understand, solve equations, make sure that person loved me, pray for clarity, make sure something was right, when the truth has always been: when God shows up, your own expectations and plans seem like sand castles because you’re finally standing inside of the real thing. 

The real thing…how did I begin to unravel that mystery? I guess the truth is, it didn’t take much unwinding. Because when love shows up, it doesn’t hide. It makes itself known and it isn’t hard to see. Love has never been a shy thing, never been one to bury itself and not resurrect quickly. The big questions it answers boldly. The ones that it has to take its time on, love is committed to the process, it doesn’t bail, doesn’t take off running. That was all I needed to see. Love like that sat front of me, inside of a man wearing a blue button down shirt, offering me truth and a cup of coffee, and I didn’t have to question the big things. That’s the real thing–thats why I could let go of people’s expectations, my own expectations, and lay down the formulas, equations, and how to make love be everything people, movies and songs told us it should be.

I’ve never really know what people expected of me, never fully known what I’ve expected of myself when it came to finally finding the real thing. But what God knew was coming was joy, forgetting the equations, open hands, prayers of gratitude—and someone so much better than I was ever expecting.

Let’s Try Holding On

Across oceans and continents, we still write and leave one other voice memos. When crisis comes or we find something funny, we send it to the other. We reminisce about the years we spent under the same roof, how we miss the Sunday mornings we spent making breakfast or listening to Josh Garrels in the living room.

Recently she asked me something that I wanted to answer, but wasn’t sure how to nail down. “What parts of me was it okay to lose?”It’s been years of growing, leaving, heartbreak, change—it’s a question we’ve both asked, but not one I’m sure I’ve figured out the answer to.

I think I’m better at holding on, so maybe it’s something I should reframe. Maybe I will give her some things she should try to keep through all the years, miles, plans, and seasons ahead.

Hope.

When all of us girls lived together in Georgia, we used to quote or sing Marky Mark, telling each other to be “in it to win it” —or otherwise. We once wrote it above the doorframe of our house.

I think holding onto hope is something like that. It’s the kind of thing you find people to wake up and sing to you. You learn to say to yourself, write it wherever you need to remind yourself to stay when things get hard.

Find people that have it, carry it, give it away, and are determined not to lose it–that are bold enough to tell you stay in it. Dig your heels in next to them and ask God to help you plant there. Wherever hope is, you’ve got a good chance of learning how to keep your heart open, soft, ready for whatever God has to say.

Joy.

Someday when I’m old, the one story I’ll probably be known for telling is the time my house of roommates were in the middle of prayer and we all ran out in the middle of a holy time to go buy an ice cream cake that said “Chicken in the Desert”.

We laughed until we cried, feasted until we were full, and we knew that God was right there in the middle. I’m also quite confident that while the girl behind the counter was confused about the statement on the cake, she saw something holy in that moment too.

Don’t lose your joy. You might sometimes lose your happiness, things that once added to your contentment and circumstances, but do not lose the ability to extend a holy moment into something that is seemingly ordinary or non-religious. God likes cake too and He likes when we pull Him into our best moments, worst moments, weirdest jokes, wildest conversations. Do not lose the ability to be childlike in your prayers and in the way you spend your days.

The world is full of people seeing everything half-empty, fully broken, and through the lens of all the things going wrong with the day. Do not lose the ability to see reality, but to choose the privilege of seeing the good God is and makes in and around us in the middle of pain.

You.

She asked me how to even remember who that is. Believe me when I tell you, sometimes it’s hard. I’m going to tell you to hold onto the parts you are so tempted to cover up, to yourself, to others, to God. The parts you are certain no one claps for, no one is impressed by, no one ever wants to see. The parts that have stuck with you, though you’ve tried to shake them. The parts that you secretly wish you could run away from. I’m telling you to hold onto them because I am learning, heaven help, I am learning that those places when I open them are the ones God pours into so fast. The only place to take them to is Him.

Those places that I sometimes think are too much, too little, not enough, that I probably need to scale back on. The second I crack the door on them, that’s when the light comes rushing in. That’s when God shows up and says something that is worth hearing and worth sharing. Don’t try to push them away or lose them, crack them open and let Him in. The things I think are worthless and weak, those are things that I find Him making the most of and showing me how to carry.

Faith.

Sometimes God likes a grand entrance, but sometimes God likes to sneak in through the back door and speak up when no one is expecting it.

But He will always come. Not usually in the way or time we thought, and I’ll probably often be standing there on the sidelines with you trying to figure out where He is and why He seems late. But we’ve seen Him show up too many times not to trust that He sticks to His promises, He shows up, and with a lot better than the plans than the ones we made.

I can’t tell you all the things you’ve lost along the way, what was meant to be yours, what to let go of, what needed to stay.

But you’re still in the making, in the wrestle, still in the game. You don’t have to know, have it all figured out. There’s no age limit on this “knowing who you are” thing. Walking with God is life long, you drop some stuff off, thinking you’ll never see it again, only to find out He picked up the bag on His shoulders and will hand it to you again at a different gate. Don’t worry about it, whatever you lay down, if it’s something you’re supposed to pick up again, He’s got you covered from now until eternity.

All The King’s Horses and Men: Lessons In Grief

I learned strength from a woman whose falls from grief would have made Humpty Dumpty himself marvel that she ever got back up. Born into a family of blue eyes, I got mine from the hazel-eyed woman who was put back together again and again. My grandmother sang me this nursery rhyme in the same red room where she taught me to pray. She knew what it meant to be broken and rebuilt, but she would never once tell you that she was put back together exactly the same. All the King’s horses, all the King’s men, try as they might, they were not the King. They didn’t make her and she became well aware they couldn’t save her. She wove this into me when we road tripped through the mountains or picked cotton on the sides of the South Carolina highway. I heard it in her drawn-out sighs when she laid flowers on the graves of her sons and cleaned the picture frame of her father in a casket, the one she lost at six years old. 

She used to wake up in the middle of the night and piggyback me into the kitchen for peanut butter and crackers. She never met a secret she couldn’t keep for me and sometimes I carry them now with a wish that she could be here to help bear them again. But I hear her in the syllables of “all the King’s horses, all the King’s men”. She would tell me now that she was just the King’s woman. That even she couldn’t put me back together again.

She died when I was just twelve years old, but by then she’d somehow taught me more than most I’ll ever know.

She raised me up to show up, even when the breath leaves your lungs and your heart threatens to never beat again, you still get up.

I watched her do it. She re-learned the melody of laughter and the joy of children, though she’d once lost both. When we buried her, I became determined to never let grief be her legacy to me, because it had not been her life. But it could have been, might have been, if she’d chosen to stay at the bottom of the wall the pain had thrown her from time and time again. 

What life might have been if she had given up when all the King’s horses and all the King’s men had shown up only to shake their heads and walk away with bloody and empty hands. But instead, I learned from the strength of a woman who used to wrap me up in her soft white sheet, carry me to the breakfast table, serve me something to eat, and read her Bible next to me. Seventy-one years broken and rebuilt: the loss of a father, sons, sisters, brothers and she laughed more than us all. Yet somehow, I’m still learning how to stand, how to breathe, and I’ve lost much less. But now grief is now held in these similar green eyes, having often depended on the King’s horses and the King’s men. Wishing she could tell me what and how long it takes to be put together by this King again.

I still eat peanut butter crackers in the late hours of the night and audibly count the hours if I hear the chime of the Grandfather clock. I love a road trip, repeating a good song, dancing in the shower. I slowly learn that these are the things the King uses to mend again. The life He gives when you let Him come in instead of pushing Him away when war, pain, grief, tell you He left you broken and never to be fixed, never as okay as when it all began.

Grief is something you may have to carry, but it doesn’t have to be your legacy. The King’s horses and the King’s men cannot fix you or save you. And this too, no matter what it is or how broken, can also be redeemed.

I Will Remember This Christmas

The snow crunched beneath our boots, my nephew was born, I decorated my tree, found the perfect gold ribbon for wrapping gifts, went to parties. I’ve done everything the holiday season calls for.

I know I’ll remember this Christmas. This one. 

Sometimes we don’t get to prepare for the pain we know is coming, sometimes we do. 

But pain always comes and it makes me wonder why I don’t often stop and look at my life when it’s good and say, “Just stay here a little longer.”

My life this year doesn’t look like a lot of the people around me. The magic of Christmas has somewhat waned. I’m old enough to know the tragedy of materialism, the pain of singleness at the holidays, the drudgery of exams, the unfortunate weight of grief. I watch my parents grow older, grow softer, grow closer. I hold tight and pray to remember these moments. I rock my newest nephew and memorize his little face. I teach the oldest to say new words and hum Christmas tunes. I try to remember to take more pictures, file away more memories. 

I am blessed. I have more than some, but somehow I am grieved because I feel that I have less than others. Christmas—all is said to be calm, why doesn’t all feel bright? They tell me to let my heart be light and yet, there is heaviness. But there is also thankfulness. Every night I hear familiar, nostalgic songs and watch classic movies and I remember that God came and still comes. Christmas brings with it the tension and the pressure to hold on to what is good because it all just goes so fast and I don’t stop enough to notice sometimes.

I want to be grateful, I will be thankful, but I do not want to be fake. Because the truth is that I will remember this Christmas, for good reasons, for hard reasons. For reasons that I will look back and laugh on. For memories of going to the airport and laughing in the grocery store. For riding in the car by myself and singing loudly. For these days without so much responsibility, for the in-between, for knowing it will not always be this way. For knowing it is good, even though it is so hard. For knowing some years will be harder. We do not know which years will be good, which years will be harder—so when you can stop and see the good, that’s worth the time you can give it.

The tension of Christmas, of looking around and knowing we are so blessed, but of knowing that sometimes that blessing highlights all the ways we were blessed differently years before and might be blessed differently in years to come. That blessing sometimes hurts. 

I’ll remember this Christmas. This one. The one in the in-between. The tension of life looking nothing like it once did, or how I wanted or hoped it would. But it is now one that is blessed, beautiful, full of tension and even grief. Sometimes it’s calm and bright, sometimes it’s crying, questions, waiting, tension, and misunderstanding. But there’s a lot of good and I’m learning to slow down to try and see it more. I am trying to see just how good it is right here and right now. This year we will gather around and raise toasts to years gone by, to those empty chairs, to ones that might be emptier sooner than we hope. I’ll remember this Christmas. This one. The one with goodness, grief, babies being born on snowy mornings. We are blessed, will be blessed, but maybe next year we will be blessed differently. But I’ll remember this Christmas. This one. And how I’m praying we can stop to sit long enough to see the goodness and remember His coming and the coming yet to be.