It was different, but possibly the best, if we strive to fulfill our promises made during our struggles. And then the next one will be even better….
It’s over. The music has stopped. The lights and color are coming down. I’m grateful the awful secular Christmas music is gone but I’m still singing the hymns. I’ve noticed that, in the best of years, we’ll take down our Christmas décor the day after and get the house ready for normal time. This was not the best of years. We had a good time, but we missed our grown children. That they would have come down on Saturday, stayed up getting drunk, only to leave Sunday, is small comfort. We told our children not to bother this year, because 200 miles and a mountain pass aren’t worth a visit that lasts under 24 hours.
Also, we have to work something out in which our revels aren’t entirely dependent upon alcohol. My own issues with alcohol are something I’m addressing this New Year, starting weeks ago already. I want a wholesome, holy Christmas before I die. Will I live long enough to pull it off, save my grown children from dependence on something that just messes you up and makes you sick in the name of after-work relief? It breaks me down thinking of when they were innocent and happy and grateful for their toys. The needed nothing but the day’s activities to help them sleep at night. Now they’re Serious Adults who work their jobs and come home to drink themselves to sleep before getting up and doing it all over again. Because that’s what grownups do.
We had a more or less wholesome, though not entirely holy Christmas with what transpired. My wife and I opened gifts on Christmas Eve, as has been our custom since moving to Big Pink in 2016. Before then, we’d had a Christmas Eve service that worked out better than it had a right to, given my struggles learning to play Christmas hymns on my guitar. I spent way too much of the time between the First Sunday in Advent following Thanksgiving and Christmas feeling bitter about my inability to just pick up and go with those songs. Those struggles were so onerous I had sworn, barring divine intervention, to quit the worship team after New Year’s Day Sunday service. As it is, one of the things on my to-do list this week is to pick up cards for the rest of the worship team and apologize for my surliness and unkind manner throughout the month, while wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and thanking the worship team leader for the $25 gift card. I’d asked God for a sign telling me not to quit, if staying on was indeed His will. He gave me the Christmas morning service. Playing those songs that morning came easily, and for that hour I felt the joy I had been missing all season long.
That feeling could have easily dissipated upon coming home but we had a dinner we were invited to on a small ranch in the broad, flat, darn-near treeless countryside south of town. The highlight for me was after dinner, but before the board game, in which the master of the house took me with him to feed his cows. The child in me who remembers—and still mourns the passing of—Thanksgivings at Annelle’s and Uncle Charlie’s farm in Hartsville, South Carolina, delighted in the dog and two cats capering about us as we went. My joy was tempered watching my elder brother in Christ struggling with lifting the hay with his pitchfork. We older folks only have so much time and usefulness left to us. It’s another inevitable lesson of a holiday that comes just before the last week of the year.
We came home an hour later than we would have liked, but we were ebullient and grateful for our church family, which was God’s 2021 gift to us. My wife and I have spent this last year keeping everyone at arm’s length, but we know now we must get more involved. God gifted me with a position on the worship team in January, and for all my fussin’ and cussin’ getting used to playing music I don’t ordinarily listen to, let alone enjoy, I’m playing my guitar like I never have before since it was gifted to me by my late parents in 1976. My wife cooks with two other ladies for the mid-week dinner and Bible studies. We know we have to get more into what we’re already doing and then steel ourselves to do more.
God refused to permit us to stay in this house and become bitter the older and more alone we got. It’s only now, curiously, that I feel happiness and gratitude as I realize how much our heavenly Father has blessed us these last 16 months. If we’re stalled out paying down our debt because of freakishly high energy bills, we’ve paid down the great bulk of it. We’re actually making friends with our brothers in sisters in Christ, brothers and sisters we didn’t have before September 2021. I’m still not terribly enthusiastic about taking donations at the church thrift store (my wife volunteered me for the job in late February) but I’m learning better how to deal with people. I still fail to see Christ in these people, but that’s on me. Who knew a job I only work two days a week at, and not even all day, would turn out to be such a strenuous exercise in spiritual growth? I have to remind myself that this growth is more necessary than the money I’m bringing in that enables us to go out to eat once a week.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that at the end of July this year, my Father struck the chain of tobacco addiction that I had re-succumbed to upon my cancer diagnosis in 2018. It’s interesting that this one addiction, which proved so hard to get away from, was struck away just like that. I no longer go to empty the ashtray where I’ve hidden it in the office because I was ashamed to leave it out in the open. I must remind myself that this was a mighty thing and much to be praised. Satan does brilliant work when it comes to making you forget just how good the Father is to you. When you submit to God, He strikes all other chains. It helps to ask and keep asking (in my case, begging) but God is real, and He is faithful to His children.
I’ve got to get faithful back. I’ve got to learn the peace and grace and wisdom of the Christ. I’ve got to learn His word. I’ve got to save my children, not just from the Hell to come, but from the Hell that is life in this world. I must become a blessing to those around me, not something people endure until I’m out of the room.
Thus our Christmas tree and decorations are still up, at least until New Year’s Day. We want to squeeze every last bit of warmth and color from this season even as it pales to plain winter. We must carry this warmth and color with us throughout the long, gray months to come.
We wish to look forward to the time we have left to us, not dread it. We must be done with dread. I pray for peace and grace, but also joy. I’m done with crying for what’s past. Let us honor those we miss by allowing the Holy Spirit to heal our broken hearts, making them “antifragile” in the process. We may still shed some tears, but we will move on. We’ll do our best in this world we’re left alone in, because now we are no longer alone. God is with us. His Son and Spirit are moving in our lives. If we move with Them, the game is ours to lose.
We have brothers and sisters. We have a family beyond our own. Even an old recovering misanthropist like me finally understands the importance of this. If you’ve found God, then find a church. I know it’s difficult. We were discouraged after years of searching following our departure from Alaska in 2003. We’d convinced ourselves we were better off doing our own readings and prayers at home. God knew better, and made sure we were taken care of—by a church that was all of one block over, visible from my upstairs bathroom window in the months the leaves are off the trees.
We must trust God more. We must learn to love and worship Him more. I’m still a little sad for all the sad things I’ve written about, but I find myself encouraged as I come to end of this report. Christmas is always a mixed bag as you grow older. It can seem further and further away with each death in your circle. But make it holy, and we might savor the Christmas flavor every day of the year if we pray and work for it.
It’s good to have something to look forward to. Like Christmas. And when it gets here, it stays with you, never leaving you to mourn the lack of color and song and cheer when the decorations come down. The color and song and cheer of the Lord of Hosts will always be with you.
Like Christmas, you still have to put the tree up. At least we have an idea of what to do now, where to begin. As the meme goes, you don’t have to wait for New Year’s Day to start the New Year, New Me stuff. The New Year begins when you and God declare it together. I close with belated good Christmas wishes and hopes for a happier new year in a renewed relationship with source of all things Good, Beautiful, and True for those lost and hurting. It doesn’t have to be darkness and hopelessness. Light and hope are there if only you’ll call out.
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