As they headed back out hours after they'd intended, we did what we also do...some follow-up processing via text once all was done for the day.
This must be a hard time of year for your family, she texted later, missing home and friends and family, and I bet at Christmas you miss your mom, too!
I cherished the heart that she has to even recognize and acknowledge that, but genuinely wrote her back the universal truth of Christmas.
It is hard. But it is good, too.
All these years that I thought Christmas was just whatever you made it in Haiti, and here I'm learning that it's whatever you make it, ANYWHERE.
After thirteen years with no Christmas lights, we hype up the kids and drive 30 minutes to the number one raved light show in Jackson...only to arrive and realize it was cancelled this year.
After thirteen years with no Christmas concerts, we fight the good fight of getting everyone dressed and curled and fed and masked and out the door early for being the ONLY family with kids in church this morning, and the very SECOND that they begin the big orchestra number, Ben has a TOTAL melt down over his sister's gum and I have to rush him, red faced, to the front sidewalk and miss it completely.
After all these years of no shopping, it stresses and depresses and exhausts us. We so enjoyed Lady Jane, as always, at dinner tonight, in cheery red and deeply missing her husband who died this year, whose birthday was this week, and whose 70th anniversary should have been last week. Our family all still lives very far away, and sometimes even our own precious family gets in a fight and bites-slaps each other after dinner over AN ADVENT CANDLE.
It is good. But it is hard, too.
I miss my mom, and I am thankful for her and for the moms in my life. I miss our friends and family, and we have a doorframe covered in the cards and prayers of friends and family. I miss our traditions, and I am so grateful for some new ones. I am disappointed and hurt by people I try and try and try with, and I am blessed and humbled by people who try and try with me. I wish for some Christmas peace and quiet, and I praise the Lord for all the Christmas sticky and snuggles and terrible-twos.
Our Haitian friends and family wish for much, and are grateful for much, and it is good and hard. Our American friends and neighbors are hurting right now, and He is helping, and it is good and hard. Covid, heavens. It has been such a year of so much hard, and there has been good, and we all struggle to find the "new."
Mary, Jesus, Christmas, man.
They get it.
Nothing came easy-good, nothing ever. Not Mary's calling, not her journey. Not her labor, not her motherhood, not her life, not her son on the cross.
Not Jesus' arrival, not his ministry, not his friendships, not his victorious moments of suffering.
It was HARD. But it was good.
Remember as you see friends and family and neighbors and Facebook photos and hear stories that it may look GOOD, but there IS hard there.
Remember as you pray and hear new heartbreaks and watch suffering all around you that it is HARD, but there is GOOD there.
In Him, in Him, is our good and hard, our cross-bearer and our cross to bear. Our victory promised and our battle raging still. Our joy and peace, and our comforter and redeemer.
It is not the Christmas season that is GOOD. It is not the grass on the other side that it is GOOD. It is not this world nor what it offers or friends or family.
The true good, it's just and only Him.
If where you are sitting is good and hard, you are right where He wants us to be...leaning in and looking for and clinging to His good, and loving one another well enough to carry the hard heavily, to action and to prayer.
Brothers and sisters, this good and hard season, may we recognize and acknowledge and address the hard-hard within and around us, and may we bring His good into every conversation, into every outreach, into every service, event, action and response.
The message of Christmas : the one who knows Hard and is Good has come.
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