Sorting Things Out

My family went to Michigan for Christmas with my dad. It was our first Christmas without Mom. It hit me really hard when, after driving 800 hard and rainy miles, we arrived to a home that was decorated beautifully for Christmas--just like my would have done, "like Mom would have wanted it," as Dad said. And yet also a home where her usual huge array of baked goods was very noticeably absent from the kitchen. Dad was great--in fact, he made one of her Norwegian specialties--julekage, or "Christmas Bread. But Mom's absence was more than obvious. We laughed together a lot, and we cried together some. The worst of it didn't hit me until we got back home to Virginia on Friday.

I'm still trying to sort it all out. Christmas is the joy season, in some ways even more so than Easter. Both holidays come with their mix of sorrow: for Easter it was Good Friday; for Christmas it was the slaughter of the innocents, the sword that would pierce Mary's heart (Luke 2:35), the realization that we sophisticated 21st Century types still need the One who came as poor, humble, crying baby to save us. And Christmas has often for many of us been an unfulfilled promise of perfect peace and giving and satisfaction. Our family has always done a really good job on that account, but never perfect; it's not possible.

Christianity and the Bible are full of contrasts: joy and sorrow, peace and conflict, truth and error, life and death. Jesus put it quite simply:

"I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world."

No walk down a garden path, but a life of challenges with victory, and with love infusing it all. I'm at a stage with all this where the confidence of that victory is strong, my trust in Christ's love is secure, but my present feelings are weariness and sorrow.

Bill Vallicella blogged last night on whether religion is about something more than just comfort. The Christian faith absolutely is: if I didn't consider it true, I wouldn't find it the least bit encouraging. I can't take heart from a lie. Yet because it is more than something comforting does not mean that it is less than comforting. This is a time when that's very welcome. I'm very confident that Christ has overcome, and will overcome.

Posted: Mon - January 1, 2007 at 01:17 PM |

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Sorting Things Out

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson