If Your Christmas Holds Some Sadness, Tears & Hardships

Tender & terrible things still happen in what’s supposed to be the happiest season of all.

On the 9th day of Advent, I cut my hand open on the lid of a tin can — and end up in ER for 4 and a half hours, waiting on 5 stitches.

The only honest thing to say in days like these days is: Tender & terrible things still happen in what’s supposed to be the happiest season of all.

Frankly, in these dark days of Advent— who doesn’t have ragged edges in need of tender mending?

On the way home from ER, through a dusting-shake of falling snow, my hand wrapped in a dressing and feeling that strange-tingling numb from the needles of freezing needed for one kind doctor to sew up the wee gash, I call my mother.

You can only honestly believe it’s the most wonderful time of the year, if you really see people going through some of the most awful times of their lives — and you choose to enter into their story to be with them.

She’s just had a train-track of staples removed all the way up her knee from the precise slice of knee replacement surgery.

On the hour, with Christmas carols playing in the background, she wince-endures through tears this regiment of exercises in her fierce fight back toward mobility.

Honestly?

You can only honestly believe it’s the most wonderful time of the year, if you really see people going through some of the most awful times of their lives — and you choose to enter into their story to be with them.

As dear Mama fights through tears and pain, as I baby the tenderness of a stitched up hand, I keep trying to read to her each day’s Advent reading, tears often unexpectedly brimming, as we read of all these people in the story of God, that is now our story, as we’re grafted into the family tree of God — Ruth and Rahab, Abraham and Sarah, David and Esther — all with dashed expectations, or exiled and cut off, or experiencing the darkest dark.

As we all wait in the dark of Advent for the birth-pangs of the coming Christ child, we all still sit daily too in the deep dark of the second Advent, waiting through the painful birth-pangs of this broken world for the coming Kingdom of God that already begins to stir.

I ache for my Mama’s pain and I ache that she now lives 7 hrs away from us here.

I ache with missing her, our first Christmas apart in 50 years, and I miss all the Christmases when she was here, and I ache with missing all that once was, how the Farmer and I used to wake up every morning of Advent to a tussling posse of half-a-dozen rambunctious young kids, all anxious and wide-eyed to move the Advent candle one day ahead in our 25 day Advent wreath, all excited to move the silhouette of the heavily pregnant Mary one day closer to the waiting manger and the hovering star, all anticipating the birth of the King.

I could weep for the loss of no longer being a Mom with all her kids under one roof, all under her wings, all circled round and starry-eyed, under the lights of the Ch ristmas tree.

A quiet house can haunt a mother’s heart. And the good launching of kids can still leave a haunted empty nest.

From our kitchen window the other day, I see a white diesel pick-up truck coming down our gravel road, same make and model as my dad’s, and how is this already the third Christmas without his plaid flannel shirts and big old worn hands, and tears fall from out of nowhere, and I choke it out loud to no one in the kitchen, “I… miss … you… Dad…”

What if it’s your heart that feels broken and cut open with a sadness that seems to defy stitches?

The story of Christmas has always held space for the dark side of our stories, for the tears and the traumas, the mourning and all kinds of warring, and deep grief.

Christmas has always been large enough to hold more than only our rejoicing, but to hold every single one of our tears too.

The dark side of the Christmas story is more than King Herod’s decree for every baby boy in Bethlehem to be slaughtered at the end of a sharp knife in a desperate attempt to kill the King of the universe — which leaves all of Ramah crying with this “weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” —- (Matt. 2:18). The dark side of Christmas also has a war in the heavenlies between a dragon about to lunge-devour the newborn child and Michael and the archangels cutting the evil beast out of heaven.

The story of Christmas has always held space for the dark side of our stories, for the tears and the traumas, the mourning and all kinds of warring, and deep grief.

It was back on the 3rd day of Advent that I ask a friend through all this welling emotion,

“Why do I feel so tender these days?”

And it’s true, tears are closer at Christmas because of the beauty and nostalgia of the season because of the twinkling lights and rich traditions and all the gorgeous memories of people we’ve lost and would do anything to just hear them open the back door, the way only they can, and have them home for Christmas just one more time.

When our eyes are bright with tears — maybe we are actually washing away more of the dark to see the light.

Yet this is what she said to me: “I’m tender too, Ann — just eyes always bright with tears this time of year. I wonder if this is what hope is-knowing darkness but always seeking the light.”

And in these dark, tender, and often painful, days of Advent, I keep thinking:

When our eyes are bright with tears — maybe we are actually washing away more of the dark to see the light.

Maybe it’s true, that Jewish proverb: “What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.”

Maybe:

Tears are a kind of cleansing of the dark, so we can see Hope’s light.

I read once how tears cleanse us of stress hormones, how tears “clear the blood of toxins and unwanted chemicals,” how tears return us to emotional equilibrium, how tears literally reset us when we are emotionally overwhelmed by either sadness or joy.

There is deep relief: Regular tears bring deep regulation.

Eyes bright with tears — always see more light. Tears give us the gift of a God-lens and a soul cleanse.

Eyes bright with tears — always see more light.

And a life large enough to hold light — alway holds space for the tears needed to cleanse a bit more of the dark.

Once when the theologian NT Wright was asked what he thought might be the most comforting verses of all for those whose lives have fallen apart, he gently whispered words from John 20:

“Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb – and saw two angels in white… At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there….” which is to say that perhaps Mary only saw the reality of the otherworldly as she really wept. As Wright offers, just maybe: “Tears function as a kind of lens – through which one might just see angels… “

Tears give us the gift of a God-lens and a soul cleanse.

There’s divine comfort in knowing our tears wash away our scales so we can see the divine right here with us.

Christmas time is a time to weep and lament because: There’s divine comfort in knowing our tears wash away our scales so we can see the divine right here with us.

But this may not happen immediately. Mary’s tears may have washed away her scales to immediately see Jesus, but she didn’t immediately recognize him as Jesus, misidentifying Him first as the Gardener.

Tears may give sight, and then time and trust give insight.

Eyes bright with tears — always see more light.

When I sit in the early morning dark by the lights of the Christmas tree, missing so many faces, sit here with this Advent story that speaks of all kinds of brave, broken hearts, who are met with such a divine rescue and healing grace that it brings tears —- and I’m not ashamed of the tears.

There’s never any shame in tears — only an enlightening.

Eyes bright with tears — always see more light.

And I see that more clearly:

Tears are more than a dam breaking because a bit of life broke your heart — tears are a stream that move you closer to other hearts, that move you deeper into the heart of what it means to be honestly human in a heartbreaking world.

And on the 12th day of Advent, with a gashed hand sewn up with 5 stitches, I reach for the phone and call my Mama doing the painful work of moving one scarred knee after surgery, and Christmas lets us process and grieve any way we need.

Because the Babe in the manger, the One who’s come all this way, the little Lord Jesus, He makes space for our crying, and loves us so deeply He weeps with us, carves our names into the palm of His hand, forever s carred by His love for us, and goes to the Cross-Tree so He can wipe away every one of our tears and give us the gift of light that will rescue us from the dark and fulfill us forever.

The star atop the Christmas tree makes the eyes bright with tears — and, even now, all this seeing more light.