Show Notes: Ep 2 When The Christmas You Plan Isn't The Christmas You Get

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.--Isaiah 9:2

Looking around on social media and talking with friends, it seems to me that Christmas spirit is running a bit low this year. I think one reason Christmas feels so hard for some of us is because we want what we've been sold. And what we've been sold is the picture of a perfect, cozy holiday where all the hard things are shored up just in time for Christmas. In reality, hard things don't take off for the holidays. Stress, illness, divorce, brokenness can be deal with or overlooked for the sake of the day, but it isn't resolved. And we crave that resolution. We want what we've been promised and we want it with some twinkle lights and a red bow and some hot cocoa.

So what do we do? If you're me this year you complain. A lot. And then you have a breakthrough. What if all the hard is supposed to help us pare down? What if the struggle is designed to make us go slow?

In days gone by, when the church year organized daily life and the darkness of winter had greater impact, Advent was a time of reflection, resting, retreating before the big celebration. We've lost that over the centuries and I think something precious was stolen from us. The Christmas season now is so bustling full, there's no room for the real light to break through. And that's what we really need. That's what we were actually promised.

Humans haven't had perfection since Eden and the fall. Thought we've been duped with the image of it ever since. The false perfection only creates more anxiety, more isolation, more hunger. We must learn to let it go so we can hold the true perfection.

It came in the form of a baby boy. Helpless, wriggling, squishy, crying baby. The fullness of God, salvation, and the longed for perfection emerged from a woman's womb into a dark stable on a starlit night. It's a far cry from a Hallmark movie.

But in this breakthrough from Heaven, in this bold incredulous move by the Godhead, we humans can have what we truly crave. Restoration, peace hope, perhaps even joy. Oh, the hard doesn't go away. The hard came for Jesus and sent his family fleeing to Egypt. The hard found him thirty years later and nailed him to a tree. Yet in His suffering, he bought our freedom. And in our suffering, we learn to love and trust and live like he did.

It isn't easy. We don't have script writers, directors, editors, and make-up artists working out all the flaws. Instead, we have the Author and Perfecter of our faith. Indeed, we have the Word made flesh.

In Him was the life and the life was the light of mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. --John 1:4-5

Gather the Good

"Mary had several plans for her first Christmas at Appleshaw but none of them materialized. That, she thought, was the way of Christmas plans. There was something disruptive about Christmas and not only in the merely material way. The original Christmas had proved exceedingly disruptive to the entire world and the tremors of the original event vibrated through every life year by year.--The Scent of Water, by Elizabeth Goudge. 

This December hasn't gone according to plan. The vision I had for this season has fallen apart. The lists we joyfully checked off last year have been a hot mess this year. I've not handled it graciously. But there is still good to be gathered. As I'm learning--you take the best and you leave the rest.

So here is my best of December 2019:

I've already recommended Joel Clarkson but it bears repeating. We also love For King and Country's Christmas Album. It's been a favorite for a few years but we were blown away by their performance on CMA Country Christmas. I hear that's playing again on Christmas Eve so you might want to check it out, or you can always YouTube it [or read this post on Little Drummer Boy. Their clip is at the end.] I also recommend Rend Collective's Campfire Christmas. It's a really great album, super fun songs, and also some really poignant songs. Definitely check it out.

Also for your listening enjoyment, I recommend the podcast 'Speaking With Joy'. Hosted by Joy Clarkson, yes, that's Joel's sister, she delves into the themes of Advent and presents up with beautiful art, music, and literature. I know it's later in the season but turn it on while you drive or wrap gifts. You'll be glad you did. I absolutely love this podcast. I've learned a lot.

And last I'm ending with some clips of my kids. My seven year old learned to play a little bit of piano this December. He also wanted to recite his memory verse. And of course, my almost four year old couldn't be left out, so she sings her little remix of 'Jingle Bells'.

From my family to yours, have a happy, imperfect, joyous Christmas. Happy Holidays!

The Season of Breaking Through (Gather the Good)

"Emmanuel has come to us. The Christ is born, Hallelujah! Our God made low to raise us up. Emmanuel, has come to us." ---God Made Low

Next Sunday is the start of Advent, December 1st. Whether you are religious or not, the Christmas season comes hard and heavy, at least in most parts of the Western World. We get bombarded with tinsel, gift wrapping, and Bing Crosby for at least twenty-five days straight. I think we all end up feeling rather Charlie Brown about it, that Christmas is too commercial, and can't we all just sing around a sad little tree in the spirit of love and friendship? Nope. We know we can't. Expectations and pressure and the burden of perfect, magical memories weight heavy. It's a lot.

To be quite honest, some years I feel Christmas, and some years I don't. This year, I've been feeling a decent amount of anxiety about it. I feel overwhelmed by the burden of expectations and wish lists. I'm tired and don't have any idea how to muster up the wherewithal to pull it off. I know I am not alone.

"As He sleeps upon the hay He holds the moon and stars in place. Though born an infant He remains the sovereign God of endless days."--God Made Low

We sang a brand new (to me) Christmas song this past week at church. There was something about hearing a totally new song on such a familiar subject that was able to chip away a bit of the rock formation around my heart. In that moment of clarity, in the respite from the weariness, I understood that this is the season of breaking through.

Breakthroughs are amazing things. Sometimes the breakthroughs seem small to us grown people, like the light bulb that finally went off for my son that unlocked the world of reading, or when my daughter figured out potty training. We did these things so long ago that we forget the independence and sense of pride that came with them. Some breakthroughs impact the world--like when Edison finally got his light bulb right. And some breakthroughs happen in inches and degrees and in the mundane everyday moments, like when I choose patience over anger, gratitude over entitlement, grace over bitterness.

"You didn't want Heaven without us, so, Jesus, you brought Heaven down..."--What a Beautiful Name

And for Christians,  Christmas is when we stop to remember the moment when Christ broke through. His breakthrough was like none other in all of history or mankind. He broke through the wall of darkness that separated the created from the Creator, the beloved from the lover, the children from their Father. His break through demanded the attention of all heaven and hell, even though most of the Earthlings slept right through it.

I don't really care if it's historically accurate to celebrate this moment in late December. I don't really care about Saturnalia and pagan roots. It's interesting conversation, but it's not exactly the point. The point is that Jesus came, he saw, he conquered (and he did it a lot better than Caesar), and it's worth remembering, it's worth celebrating. I realize that the victory came at Calvary, but without Bethlehem, we have no way to the cross. To rend the veil in the temple, a breach first had to be made into our world at all.

"For all our sins one day He'll die to make us sons of God on high. Let every heart prepare Him room. The promises have all come true."--God Made Low

Since I was in middle school, I read a book almost every year called The Birth by Gene Edwards. It's a short little book, probably a novella actually. And it's told from the perspective of Michael and Gabriel, the archangels. In this book, Michael actually has to bust a hole in an iron or steel wall that has come to separate Earth from Heaven so that Gabriel can get through to Mary. I don't know if that's a Biblically accurate idea or not, but it's a powerful one anyway. There had to be a literal breakthrough on the part of Heaven to penetrate the palpable darkness of sin and evil coating the entire world. And not just a message came through. Emmanuel. God with us. Jesus.

So. It's late November. Thanksgiving is just a few days away. We decorated our tree and my Amazon shopping cart is full. Christmas steadily approaches. The question is: will this be a season of breakthrough in my own heart? Will the coating of weariness, uncertainty, frustration be busted open in this season of light? God, I hope so, I pray so. Let it be so. Let the trappings and burdens fall away. They're not real. They don't matter in the end. What matters is the breakthrough. I know I need one this year. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

I'll be sharing some of my favorite Christmas music, books, recipes, and so on here on the blog over the next weeks and days. It's a deliberate choice on my part to share beautiful things when I would rather just skip it and sleep. I had a realization the other day that beauty ingested but not shared will only ferment and rot inside. So, I'll be sharing and I hope it blesses you, and helps you find some light in a frazzled season.

"God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay. Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan's pow'r when we were gone astray. O' tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. O' tidings of comfort and joy!" --God Rest Ye Merry Gentlmen

Sparrows, Rams on the Mountain, and Me

When my daughter was born she screamed for the first forty-five minutes of her life. She wasn't crying. She was screaming. She was irate. Inconsolably angry at being brought into this cold, strange world. And she was hungry. I mean, she was eleven pounds, eight ounces at birth. The girl probably really wanted some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of cold milk. It was her favorite in utero and it's her favorite now at three years old. But it's not exactly protocol to give newborns cookies and milk, however much they scream. Instead, we tried to get my baby to nurse. By "we" I mean I had a whole team working with me and trouble-shooting and trotting out every trick they had up their sleeves. When the lactation consultant--who was so kind and cheerful and positive and wonderful--declared that my daughter was a "tough case" I knew I was in for trouble.

You see, I have two children (most of you already know this, but I will write for those of you who perhaps don't know me in real life). My daughter is my youngest. I have a son three and a half years older. And he never did get the hang of nursing. Oh, we tried. And the guilt I had when I stopped trying and started using formula instead was intense. Deeply intense. And very much exacerbated by my undiagnosed post-partum depression and the mommy wars. You know, those passive aggressive comments made on social media that cut to the quick and everyone bloody well knows it. Those mommy wars.

So when my sweet screaming girl came along, I had been determined that I would breastfeed her longer than my son. If memory serves (which it doesn't because I've been sleep-deprived for almost seven years), I made it about ten weeks with my son and my goal with my daughter was eleven. I wanted just one more week. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the hospital....Collectively, the experts and my husband and me agreed that we would try to get my daughter to latch for ten minutes and if she was still hopping angry, we'd stop and give her a bottle. We didn't want her to start associating feeding, or worse yet, me, with anger and frustration. The plan was to pump as much as possible but if girlfriend needed a little formula, that was okay too. Really hard for my pride in the mommy wars, but okay.

I so clearly remember sitting alone with her in my quiet little hospital room and feeling deeply worried. I had all this emotional baggage from "failing" with my son. I had hoped she would be easy. Nothing about this was going right and we hadn't even left the hospital. Then--all of a sudden, as they say--I felt in my spirit a message from the Lord. He assured me that he looks after birds and makes sure they get enough to eat each day, and that my dear sweet girl was worth more to him than any bird. He would make sure she'd thrive too. One way or another, I wasn't in this alone. I wasn't responsible for making sure she was okay. I mean, I wasn't free to neglect her, but the parts that were out of my control were in His control. He saw me. He saw my daughter. And we were going to be okay.

Naturally, I looked up the scripture passages about sparrows and the lyrics to the song "His Eye is on the Sparrow". I started singing it to her to soothe her. I found a rendition by The Newsboys that I think freaks my mother (Hi, Mom!) out a little bit, but it worked like magic to settle my fussy newborn. I learned all the words to that song. I memorized them in the first week or so of her little life. It became my anthem, even when it didn't work to calm her down.

There were some nights when she just wouldn't stop crying. It didn't matter how hard I tried, how much milk I offered, if I swaddled her or not, if I rocked her or not, if I sang or not. It didn't matter to her if I sang, but I kept singing because it mattered to me. I distinctly remember standing in her nursery, so bleary-eyed from no sleep, and teary-eyed because I was just so wrecked by the crying infant and singing over and over again...

"And I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free for His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me."

Singing about happiness with tears streaming down your face makes an indelible impression on your spirit. I was clinging to that promise. I grabbed hold of it hard and I didn't let go.

Eventually, my daughter got a grip on her emotions and settled into a pretty wonderful baby. I also eventually gave up nursing her (I believe I made it eleven weeks and one day.) About the same time she became rather pleasant, PPD hit me hard. Anxiety. Never had it before. Not like that anyway. Which I talked about in the post 'Kindness Carries the Light'. Fluctuating hormones, and weeks of high-stress and very little sleep did me in. Still, I had the promise that God was watching.

And not just watching, lest you think this God of mine is a passive one who merely observes from on high and occasionally remarks to other celestial beings about the tiny humans on that blue and green ball. That is not my God. My God is deeply personal and intentional and deliberate and kind. God moves. His plans are, in fact, set in motion before my need even arises. He knows what I need now and what I will need next week and what I'll need in three years or thirty or whatever. Being omniscient gives you that kind of high-level clearance. And being omnipotent gives Him the clearance to also do something.

You don't always see it. Or, I don't anyway. I probably shouldn't speak for you. Maybe you're more observant than I am. But I don't usually see the provision before it's smacked me in the face and announced it's arrived. I don't see the ram climbing up the hill as I trudge up with my sacrifice. When Abraham and Isaac went up the mountain so Abraham could sacrifice his beloved son, he didn't notice or know about the ram coming up that would take Isaac's place. But God did. God made sure that ram was coming. Lately, I like to trace the steps backwards in this biblical narratives that we know so well that we take the details for granted. God knew that ram was needed the day it was born. That ram had a purpose and God got it up the hill for Abraham on just the right day. The ram wasn't a week early and missed it, it wasn't a day late and a dollar short. The timing was perfect. The provision came in the moment of crisis.

Friends. I'm going to be honest with you. 2019 has been a moment of crisis for my family. All three months of it. My husband has a heart condition; it's genetic and he's known about it for over twenty years. It's been well-managed and monitored for those two decades. This January he had an episode that landed him in the hospital for five days while they poked and prodded and scanned him, then hemmed and hawed and read results. The good news is after a minor surgery where he got a new internal defibrillator with some additional features and some new medicines, he's stable and good to go. He can live his normal life and he's fine! Except his employer won't let him come back to work for a year. We don't understand it. The doctors don't understand it. No one I have talked to understands it. And mountains of paperwork has been printed and faxed and copied and mailed and messed up by people not us....and hours and hours of phone calls have been made to fix what's messed up and find out what's needed and to determine what our immediate future holds. It's been stressful.

Yet. My God is watching. El-Roi. The God who sees me. This name was given to Yahweh by the Egyptian slave Hagar, a woman mistreated and hurt and desperate. She was sure she was alone in the wilderness and unable to provide for her son when God spoke to her. He gave her a promise and he provided for her and her son.

I've loved the story of Hagar ever since college when I first intimately understood that my God is one who sees me. Then today, oh, today was a hard day of listening to my husband's half of phone calls and feeling like I can't fix anything and trying to keep the kids and the dog quiet and no one was having it. I was so done. I was just so exhausted deep inside. I used up all my soul energy frowning and fretting and freaking out but swallowing it up whole so the kids wouldn't start to worry. Anyone else ever been there? Anyway. I finally got shoes and socks on the wild ones and we headed out the door to pick up some things we needed. As I stepped into the garage, it hit me--all of a sudden:

"His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me."

It was almost audible. I'm surprised my kids didn't' say, "who said that?" I dialed up the playlist I made for my daughter when she was a newborn, I haven't listened to it in two years at least. The first song on it is "His Eye is on the Sparrow" by The Newsboys. Ordinarily, my children have very strong opinions about what we listen to in the car. If it's not The Greatest Showman, Mary Poppins Returns, or Charlie Brown Christmas they're not having it. Today we listened to "His Eye is on the Sparrow", "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" (the Lily James version, so lovely), "Blackbird" (yes, by the Beatles. My son asked to turn it up), "Forever Young" (sung by Alfie Boe. Look. It. Up. Get tissues first), and "Your Grace Finds Me." They fussed a little with the last one but I had it cranked pretty loud at that point. *Shrug* I was worshiping the Lord.

I wish I could tell you that we got home from the store and my husband ran out to greet us shouting that all our problems are over and we struck oil in the backyard...or found gold under the shed....or someone just gave us a check that would cover the whole year....or some other bananas thing. He didn't. But he was smiling. And we had a nice dinner and then he played with my son while my daughter and I did the dishes. Okay, I did the dishes. She played in the sink but it makes her so ridiculously happy to do it that I no longer mind the water slopped on the floor or the fact that she's technically in my way. We were together. We've been together more in 2019 than we've ever been since the kids came along. And happier. We have our moments--all families and couples do. It can't always been sunshine.  But we're contented together. We play games and build with Legos and do puzzles and draw pictures and tell stories and read books and watch movies and play with the dog. There's so much to do just here in our home. The little home we complain about because the kitchen needs remodeled and we wish it sat on five acres. Yet this home is full of good things, and "every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like the shifting shadows." (James 1:17 NIV)

James wrote that in his contribution to the New Testament. James was a brother of Jesus. I wonder if he was among the brothers that first thought Jesus was mad and tried to bring him home to just be quiet and stop embarrassing the family. In their defense, maybe it was bad for business. Reputation is everything for a family business. But James came around. We don't know how exactly, but clearly he came to believe in his big brother. And I'm glad he did. James also wrote "consider if pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance....Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him."

In my life, I have faced trials of many kind. The other evening I started thinking through the last several years of my life and the list of trials was staggering (I had a legitimate reason for pondering this, it wasn't self-pity, I promise! It may perhaps be another post sometime this year). I don't know that I've always persevered well. I'm not much for perseverance typically. I'm more of a sit in the dirt and whine type. And yet. I'm here. And I've learned so much about the Lord it is also staggering. I know I haven't considered it pure joy. At no point today did I start naming and claiming 'pure joy' about our circumstances. Yet, in the moment when I heard the Good Shepherd speak to me, I experienced peace and joy. I was able to worship Him with a lump in my throat and kids in the backseat because I know that His eye is on the sparrow and He also watches me. I don't know that have that 'crown of life' yet, but I know that if I get handed any crowns or treasures when I arrive in Paradise that I'm headed straight to throne room to set it at the feet of Jesus. I have much thanks to give for all the rams on the mountain, all the provision in the wilderness, and all the reassurances that my family and I are worth more than many sparrows. Really, I owe Him everything.