Till We Are Home

Thanksgiving is here…well, at least here in the US. The holiday season pretty much begins in October as a lot of people gear up for Halloween and dressing up while starting to wear sweaters and enjoying crisper air after a long summer season. We roll through the month picking out pumpkins and celebrating even little days like “Red Cup” day and finding joy in warm mugs in our hands. 

October passes and we find ourselves heading toward Thanksgiving which is usually a sweet time of gathering with family, thinking about how you’ll cook the turkey (or decide to do something altogether different like our family now does), and do your last mow of the yard ending in a celebratory dance. (Or is that just me?)

Thanksgiving is a sweet holiday to remember what the Lord has done and give thanks to Him for these things and also for who He is and how He’s saved us through His Son. Thankfully (pun intended), we move from Thanksgiving right into the Advent season. We experience the first vestiges of the winter weather, some even enjoying snow amid houses decorated with lights and cartoonish inflatables. Christmas carols are heard through the halls of homes while festive traditions fill our calendars. 

This season can be such a magical and charming time of year. So many people love the ramp up from the end of summer all the way to the culmination through Advent and finally to ring in the New Year. We can enjoy get togethers with friends and loved ones, raise a chorus of praise to our God in meaningful and unique ways while stirring a warmth in our hearts and lives that seems quite distinctive compared to the rest of the year.

It all can feel so magical.

However, this year I’ve been wondering about that magic. When the thermometer begins its slow downward movement and the calendar page flips to the last quarter of the year, my body instinctively anticipates the return of those magical feelings. Yet, when our youngest daughter died three years ago, there was no magic and no charm upon the season’s arrival. The subsequent years felt much of the same as we missed our little one so much and missed so much of that family we used to be, let alone watching my wife suffer through her second cancer, then this year watching my mom pass away. 

So, this year, I wondered along with my wife if we would ever feel that magic…that charm to the holiday season again? This will be our fourth Christmas without Isabel…a statement that still shocks me. How can we ever sincerely look forward to this time of year again?

Honestly, I don’t know. 

Well, at least I don’t know if we could ever return to the same level of understanding that magic like we did in the past. But, I doubt we’re alone in that. 

I’ve said in the past that I’ve absolutely loved being a husband and father. It’s been one of my greatest joys in life and still is. There was a time when the kids were younger that I look back on and feel like it was a golden era for our family. And that magical and charming feeling around this season was at its height. 

That didn’t diminish over the years but just changed as they (and we) grew older. We still had so much fun and even more traditions accumulated over time to further enhance the magic. I would assume this is likely true for a lot of families. We have our golden eras which we fondly look back on, but things change…we just happened to experience a drastic change in the middle of it all. 

Yet, that’s what the Lord intended for us as a family to experience. We trust Him that it all works out for our good, but it’s still a tough road to walk on. 

As this holiday season rolled up, and I imagine future holiday seasons may do in the future as the Lord wills, I hesitantly approached it with a learned, experiential uncertainty. The magic of yesterday is no more…how could it not be? 

But, that was for yesterday…and…I’m thankful we had it. I truly am.

However, is the magic gone? Is it gone for good? I don’t know for certain for we still have to walk through the rest of this season and whatever else the Lord may have for us in the future. I suspect it’s not completely gone, though, but changed.

Changed, yes.

Completely gone, no.

I suspect the Lord’s not done with us. I suspect the magic of the holiday season won’t be what it was…but, I suspect the magic of this season will instead be deeper. We are and we will approach the celebrations, the gatherings, the decorating, the fellowships, the traditions with sober eyes and hearts. Sober because we understand a little more fully that mixture of joy and sorrow. Good and joy and laughter and excitement that can still be had. Yet, it will always be tempered by sadness and sorrow for we will miss our little girl. We’ll miss my mom. We’ll miss our nephew. We’ll miss our fathers. We’ll miss our grandparents and friends who have all gone before us. 

I think the Lord intends this sobriety to awaken us, though, to the greater reality these things point us to. We should enjoy this holiday season for all the good gifts it brings by God’s grace. That’s good and true, and there’s a magical quality to all of it. However, our sorrow over loss points us to deeper magic found in the culmination of this holiday season in Advent.

The sorrow in the magic points us to why Advent is so beautiful. We celebrate the birth of our Savior who came as light in the midst of darkness. His humble birth so many years ago dawned a new era to bring life from death. Our sin wrecked this world and brought death…the brokenness of our world is completely due to our desire to rebel against our God. Yet, we could do nothing about it…we’re impotent against the consequences of our sin and cannot save ourselves.

But God.

God sent His Son, born of a virgin, to live the perfect life we could not that satisfied the requirements of the law, then died the perfect death that satisfied the wrath of God. Jesus’ first Advent brought a deeper magic into the world that we celebrate now at Christmas.

As the cars fill up your driveway while the sounds of clinking plates and filling stomachs echo in the halls, enjoy the magic of this season. And for those of us finding that insufficient these days because some of our chairs are empty around the table, let that point you to the deeper magic brought by the coming of our Lord. We won’t ever experience or return to that same magic these holidays used to bring, but we can now experience something deeper if the Lord opens our eyes to it and we submit to His help.

So, raise your glass, finish wrapping that last present, snuggle up next to a loved one and wipe each other’s tears as you miss your loved ones. But, also hope in that deeper magic we can only find in Christ whose first Advent we end our celebrations on this year, and will…

Till we are home…