Here we go, holidays.
My desk is drowning in toy magazine cut outs and hilarious Christmas lists, everything from silk pillowcases to remote control cars. The kids and Matt are pushing the Thanksgiving - Christmas line as they always do, and mama is holding firm, as I always do. They think I don't know they listen to Christmas music in Dad's car, and wildly love their sneaky ways :).
It's just here...the week Dad came, last year. The season we have always gotten together for, even in Haiti. My sister and her family left for Costa Rica today, and here we are and it is here. All these big firsts, kinda shoved into one stream of gaps and winces.
These are usually things I like to push through. My family can't come? I'll invite 12 other people who don't have family! I'm hurting and missing? Let me put my back into doing more alongside those who are hurting and missing, too. But this time...lately...I am feeling the need to just say it. To just feel it. To just mourn.
I told Sharon when she was here that's what I felt like I needed, some space to dwell and think and remember and mourn and not just rush right past. What would that look like? she asked, and all I could think right off was quiet.
My dear sister-friend is zip-lining through the jungle past volcanoes in a country that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, and I get that and know they are going to have the most amazing time. But I really just want to sit on the porch swing where I sat with dad a year ago and be quiet. My 40th birthday last year was one of the most heartbreaking days of my life. Dad was here for it, and Thanksgiving, and then he was so incredibly sick that day...so sick and in pain we almost took him to the hospital and he completely forgot it was my birthday, the suffering was so intense. He laid upstairs groaning in the darkest room possible, and I waited for it to pass trying to keep the kids hushed, not wanting to leave, unable to do anything to help him, and realized this was the last birthday, the last Thanksgiving, the last time under my roof, the last Christmas...that this was it...and it was excruciating. That was the last time the kids saw Grandpa, and it was awful and I desperately wished those weren't their final memories, and that I could carry some of his suffering.
Here it is, the season of "this time last years", the season of fa-la-la-la-las and more and bright and loud and busy, and I want to sit quietly in it with a candle and blanket and beg His presence, and sit there.
Once everyone is off school and if the court order for travel submitted four weeks ago (and again 3, 2, 10 days and 1 week ago) is ever responded to, we're heading to the nearest beach for a few days, and I'm determined to find a bit more quiet than the ever busy sounds of home. Perhaps.
Either way. I'm just gonna feel it this season. And I'm probably gonna just say it, at least here. And I am so thankful that the power of His genuine presence, which is seeped in such LOVE, is OURS this season. EVERY season.
Whatever good or hard or sweet or bitter these holiday weeks are or bring, God's generous offer of His very presence is His most precious gift to us...is what Christmas is all about....God's presence, walking on earth through His Son.
He IS here, just as He was awful-last-year. I'm not going to miss Him.
💙
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