Almost Missing Christmas

Have you ever missed a Christmas? Chances are if you have lived very long there has been a Christmas that came and went and you hardly recognized it. The signs of Christmas were all around you. The stores had been telling you Christmas was coming even before Halloween. Everywhere you went you bumped silver bells, sparkling lights and Christmas bargains galore. Santa Claus definitely came to town—but somehow he lost your address.

There are many reasons why Christmas slips through our fingers. Sometimes it is sickness or the anniversary of some hard grief. It may be loneliness or just looking around at all the families that supposedly are having a good time. It could be too little money, too many expenses or a child in Iraq or Afghanistan.

One year our family missed Christmas completely. I had resigned a church three weeks before Christmas without a place to go. It was the first Christmas I had not preached or been part of the festivities. Without a job for the first time in my life, I dreaded Christmas.

My wife’s mother had been ill with Alzheimer’s for several years. Christmas week word came and it looked like the end was near. All Christmas Eve we called back and forth to Florida where she lived. How is she doing? we kept asking. Not very good—she’s mighty low, the answer kept coming back. Late that night the word came: “Mother has died.”

We drove all Christmas Day to get to Kentucky where the funeral would be held. So the day after Christmas we gathered at the funeral home to say goodbye to my wife’s mother. Because of the holiday there was no way to get word to the paper about her death. Few of her friends or neighbors had heard about her passing. So a little tiny circle of grievers came together to listen to the old words, hug one another, and then move on to the cemetery to say our final goodbyes.

Two days later, heading home our son told us that our daughter had asked her husband to leave. She didn’t want us to know with all the other things going on. But this was the beginning of their divorce.

It was Christmas and we were sure had missed it all. No job, an uncertain future, the death of a parent, and the crumbling marriage of a daughter with a two-year-old—it was just too much. Back home we took down the sagging Christmas tree, placed the ornaments back in their boxes and wondered what the New Year would bring.

Since that painful season I have read the Christmas texts with different eyes. Christmas came to an occupied land where the people were held captive by Rome. It was a place of terrible poverty and injustice. The Christ child would be born to peasant parents in a drafty barn surrounded by scruffy shepherds and animals and steaming dung. So Joseph took his little family and fled one night to Egypt to protect the new baby. Herod’s soldiers had threatened to kill every male child under the age of two. Much like Iraq, blood ran through their streets that first Christmas. This was the setting of the prophet’s words: “Unto us is born, unto us is given…” Despite the darkness, the terror and injustice of it all—I have discovered a powerful truth: Christmas came. Indeed, Christmas always comes at the darkest time of any year when the days are shortest and the nights are coldest and the world’s troubles pile up like winter leaves.

So every Christmas season since then I re-discover the miracle of this holy season. Our family did not miss Christmas after all. Maybe Christmas always speaks to the hardest and most difficult things that any of us face. That next spring after that difficult time I found a job. We moved to a new place and started life over again. Grief, hard and long, began to slowly lose its power. Our daughter patched up her life and moved on.

This holy season does not depend on circumstance or mood or condition. So this Christmas let us lift up your hearts, troubled or not. The power of this season will touch and change us not only during these days but also in all the days yet to come. No wonder Christmas never grows old. “Fear not,” the angel said to poor shepherds. It is a word for us all.