Two months ago, my husband lost his sister unexpectedly. She went into the hospital with a respiratory problem and the hospital was going to keep her for a couple days to observe her. In the middle of the night she coded and she was gone from this world.
Less than a month ago, we received a difficult diagnosis for one of our daughters and each day has been a day filled with trusting the Lord to take care of her.
Also around a month ago, I remember penning the words to my friends: “I want Christmas to be different this year. I want to find ways to focus on Jesus and to not get caught up in the culture around me.”
I’ve been trying to find the perfect Advent series this year to help me get the meaning of Christmas more deeply embedded in my own heart. While I read some good things, it did not fill me the way I had hoped. But what did fill me was praying for my husband’s family and for my daughter on a regular basis. What did fill me was the closeness to Jesus that came from the struggles my family has gone through lately. I acutely felt His presence and it was deeply inscribed on my heart that He really loves us and has not forgotten about us just because we’re going through trials. These trials are not signs of God’s punishment or apathy in our lives, they are opportunities to press into a loving Father and to let our faith be roused and lifted. They were and they are times of perseverance, and this perseverance is only possible because of the faith God has increased in us. We came to know the love of the Father more through these trials, and because they are on-going, this understanding and trusting in Him daily is also on-going. I started to see again why God sent Jesus to us; because we so desperately need Him.
In the interim of these weeks, we’ve been working with those in the sex trade and those who are living in bleak, oppressed, addicted, and forgotten situations. Yesterday, I read a portion of the Christmas story to a 48 year old woman who has never heard of it before. I asked her if she knew who Mary was from the Bible and she said no. I told her that Mary was a young girl, a virgin, and that she had a baby. Did she know the baby’s name? She said no. “Do you know about the baby people have talked about that was born in a manger in Bethlehem?” No, she did not know. I told her that baby’s name was Jesus. Did she know who Jesus was? She was not sure but the name sounded familiar to her.
This lady lives about 10 minutes from where I live and she’s lived in this location for the past 1o years. Her entire life, she has grown up in the city I now live in. She has never read her Bible because she cannot read. But she has heard of the Bible. We met because she received my phone number from a friend and she called and asked if someone could come and read the Bible to her, and could someone come and be her friend?
This morning, a lady who lives in a motel, who is a survivor of child sexual abuse, called me. This lady is two months clean from meth, has lost her children, and has never found healing for the trauma she experienced as a child. It was an incident that was just swept under the rug and she was supposed to deal with it and get on with life. But like so many others who have had this happen to them, she was unable to find ways to successfully overcome the trauma without the necessary help and support available to her. Now that the support is available and the healing process is started, changes are taking place in her life. She called me to let me know she is waiting on a church bus and she’ll be in church this morning. She wanted to tell me this also, “I invited others to our Bible study at the motel tomorrow and they cannot wait to come!”
Today, a small group of friends will be visiting the home of a woman who is in the sex trade. We’re hosting a Christmas party for her. The young woman told me last night on the phone, “I’m cooking for you guys and I can’t wait to see everyone!”
These daily missional activities of entering into bleak homes and motel rooms and hugging prostitutes also filled me more with the meaning of Christmas. In these activities, I have felt as if we were doing life with the Lord. I did not feel like I had try to find a hidden God, I felt Him in our midst.
So yesterday, asking the question to a lady, “Do you know the name of the baby who was in the manger?” embedded the meaning of Christmas in my heart the way I was seeking a month ago.
Sometimes, we try to find God and to understand Him better while we’re sitting on our sofas with the latest books on Christianity surrounding us. But I’ve found the greatest understanding and the most enveloping presence of Christ comes when we follow Him outside the walls of our churches and homes. If your lamp is lit inside your home, your city cannot see it.
For me this year, it’s been a different kind of Christmas season. The beauty of the season did not come from the culture or from finding the perfect book; rather, it came through trusting God through trials and following Him to help ease the burdens of others so that they might experience His love for them.
I naively thought I could find this in just the right Advent app. But the Lord showed me it’s found through living.
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