The Farmer and I are somewhere on an wide-open highway in the early days of Advent when I catch the phrase sprawled across a billboard:

The holidays always
find a way.
*

But what sticks with me long after the billboard blurs by is the reality that:

The holy days always
find a way,
because they are about The Way Himself finding a way to actually be with us.

This is not poetic cliche.
This is cosmic reality.

Resource: Manger and Nativity
Resource: Manger and Advent Wreath

This is what I keep thinking about for days:

The holy days always find a way, to do more than find some way to just get through, or just get by, or somehow just get that gift under the tree, or just get us back in touch with the people and relationships and memories and all that ultimately matters.

The holidays always find a way…
only because they’re about God finding a way to be with us, and life in His presence is our actual way of being whole.

The relief of the holidays is:

You don’t even have to come, all you faithless and tearful and hopeless, because He finds the Way to come to you. If you’re weary of the way things never seem to change, if you’re tired of trying to make your way through, Christmas is for you, because The Way comes to you.

You don’t even have to come, all you faithless and tearful and hopeless, because He finds the Way to come to you. If you’re weary of the way things never seem to change, if you’re tired of trying to make your way through, Christmas is for you, because The Way comes to you.

God Himself sets aside the glory of heaven to get inside the grit of humanity, left the status of heaven to be with all of us hurting — and ultimately the Spirit of Christmas is about leaving everything privileged, to be with everyone pining for hope.

Like the Christ Child did for us.

Some have faith in the mind-blowing impossible, that God of the universe came as a little baby …

Others have faith in the the mind-blowing impossible, that the whole of the universe came from a Big Bang….

Choose which mind-blowing impossible will blow the door of your heart wide-open with an explosion of Love.

We all get to choose our own mind-blowing faith… because we all, without exception, have faith of one kind or other —- but only one kind of faith turns toward His very real arms reaching to hold us, to be with us.

That’s the gift of the holy days —- the holy days always find a way …. a way for us to find we are in the only place that matters, the place where we get to feel the Withness and Witness of God.

And wholeness in our souls is about feeling the very Withness of God — not just merely, cerebrally, knowing about it.

Some have faith in the mind-blowing impossible, that God of the universe came as a little baby …Others have faith in the the mind-blowing impossible, that the whole of the universe came from a Big Bang….Choose which mind-blowing impossible will blow the door of your heart wide-open with an explosion of Love.

I keep returning to this, when I feel the flooding rush of angst about lists that keep endlessly morphing and mushrooming and mountaining, when I look at the calendar and see that square, just before Christmas, looming larger for our daughter’s heart surgery — and I pause in the moment and ask my soul:

Do you actually feel how Emmanuel, the God who is with you, is firm, solid love under you, never going anywhere?

Do you actually feel how Emmanuel, God who is with you, is steeled certainty at your back, always holding you, all your sureness, all your strength, all your spine and courage?

Do you actually feel how Emmanuel, God who is with you, is muscled safe arms right under yours, Love enfolding around you, shielding you, upholding you, carrying you like swaddled hope next to the assuring, steadying beat of His heart?

Christmas proves the point:

Emmanuel, the God who is with us, doesn’t stay some lofty idea in the upper echelons of philosophy, a notion in our noggin, but Emmanuel, God who is with us, takes on a body, comes embodied, feels what it’s like to be one of us, so we can feel in our bodies the safe relief of Him being here, right here, with us, being our way for us.

The carols play, the candle light flickers around nativities… and, in the midst of everything, we pause to sit with our souls:

Is my experience of the withness of God merely a knot of knowing stuck in a rut at the back of my head — or do I feel the sureness of His withness, the breadth and expanse of His presence enveloping all of me in this moment, spreading right across the whole of me, fully feeling the safe sureness of His withness under me and around me and in me?

We don’t fully know the Withness of God in our life —— until we fully feel the Withness of God in our body.

Within our body is where our trauma lives, our fears live, our thoughts live, our angst lives. If we don’t feel the withness of God actually within us… we actually aren’t experiencing the transformative power of what it means that God is with us.

Because it’s His withness that changes our whole life experience.

“In the thin air of Advent, you may not even know how to say it out loud: “I thought it would be easier.”

And your God comes near: I will provide the way.

You may not even know who to tell: “I thought it would be different.”

And your God draws close: I will provide grace for the gaps.

You may not even know how to find words for it: “I thought I would be . . . more.”

And your God reaches out: I will provide Me.

God gives God. That is the gift God always ultimately gives.

Because nothing is greater and we have no greater need, God gives God.

God gives God, and we only need to slow long enough to unwrap the greatest Gift with our time: time in His Word, time in His presence, time at His feet…. Time with Him.”
excerpt from The Greatest Gift

The holy days always
find a way —-

to simply feel the gift of His presence.

Resource: Manger and Nativity
Resource: Manger and Advent Wreath

Back on a farm far from wide-open highways, The Farmer and I light a candle mid-Advent and we sit close by the fire.

And it kindles within…

Christmas isn’t just a warm feeling within us…
Christmas is about feeling within us how God Himself is with us.

And the flame blows lower and our love burns higher.

***

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