Christmas, the day you looked forward to most as a kid. It’s hard to put words to the excitement, anticipation, magic and joy a child experiences on Christmas day and the days leading up to it. The lights, decorations, wrapped gifts waiting under the tree, happy music, delicious treats and fun-filled traditions that you only get to experience during the Christmas season.
Things begin to change as you become an adult. Maybe the season becomes a little more stressful as you gain more of the responsibility of making everything come together and life starts to pull you in many different directions. However, even then, when you think of Christmas you think of happiness, the joy of being able to give and receive gifts, singing Christmas carols, time with family, some family you may not get to see very often, keeping and making traditions, and so many smiles and laughter. It’s like even just thinking about it seems to lift your spirits.
But what about the times when you simply cannot seem to muster all those happy and joyful feelings???
Maybe Christmas is a difficult time for you and you have trouble finding joy in anything. Maybe Christmas is a painful reminder of a tragic loss. Maybe you’re grieving a new loss and it’s impossible for Christmas to be the same as it was. Maybe you’re facing a diagnosis that brings with it physical symptoms that make it impossible to function as you have before and an inescapable sense of uncertainty, fear and doubt. Maybe you’re battling a mental illness that makes you feel utterly alone and as if there is nothing good and you’ll never truly be happy again. Maybe recent days, weeks, months or even years have been full of change, deeply troubling circumstances, unanswered questions and hardship that leaves you feeling like the world is spinning, the ground is giving way underneath you, nothing seems to make sense and you just can’t seem to find your bearings.
Do you currently find yourself in any of those places? Does it sometimes feel absolutely impossible to summon those happy feelings and find joy in all the things where it once felt natural and easy?
I understand. I can relate. I do find myself there and it does feel impossible.
The season I’m in feels unbearable.
I’m trying to process and heal an enormous amount of trauma from my childhood and adolescence. Traumas that have devastated my entire sense of self and my self-worth and physically altered my brain, body and nervous system.
In the process I’ve uncovered new things that left me feeling utterly bewildered, doubting my entire sense of reality and questioning everything I ever thought I knew.
I’m grieving the loss of my family of origin as I knew it, knowing that it can never be the same again, grieving the countless years of my life that I’ve lost to all of this and the loss of parts of my physical health that I may never regain because of the massive toll it has taken on my body.
Add to that the very hard and trying circumstances and stresses that my husband and I have faced in more recent years, including 6 years of infertility and the additional pain of four losses. The most recent loss was just this week and that is one of the heaviest things on my heart right now. We should be celebrating a new beautiful little life this Christmas, but instead we’re grieving the loss of that life. I know I’ll get to see and enjoy my babies in heaven someday, but that doesn’t make it less painful right now.
I’m not writing this to talk about the reasons why we can’t celebrate this Christmas though. Quite the opposite in fact.
I’m here to talk about why we can celebrate! Regardless of our circumstances…
Immanuel. God With Us.
About ten years ago I was grieving the very unexpected loss of my uncle. My entire family was grieving and I was so focused on being there for my Grandma. No one was happy. No one was excited. No one wanted to even think about Christmas. Everything felt wrong.
I was discussing my own feelings of apathy towards everything with a friend one night and she reminded me of something I had let myself forget — Christmas isn’t about all the things we tend to get most excited about. It doesn’t have anything to do with being happy or even spending time with family. It’s about celebrating the coming of Immanuel, God With Us.
Since then I’ve never forgotten it and it has come to mean more and more to me over the years as I’ve thought and meditated on it.
I’d like to share some of those thoughts. Some things the Lord showed me through my own quiet time with Him and some others that He taught me through experiences and things I’ve read over the years.
In truth, God has always been with us. Even before Jesus. He is omnipresent, He’s everywhere, all the time. Here are a couple of my favorite passages of scripture that show just exactly that…
“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast” (Psalm 139:7-10)
“‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:23-24)
One of the main themes throughout the entirety of the Bible is God’s relentless desire to dwell with His people and to be known by them on a deeply personal level.
But sin caused us to rebel against Him over and over again and created a distance that couldn’t be bridged. He was still with us, still nearby in that He is everywhere, always and that His presence fills the whole earth and all of reality. That still isn’t the level of nearness that God has always desired though. Our ability to be in relationship with Him was extremely limited because of our own sin.
This is not how God designed us. Though He knew this was the case and that it always would be unless He intervened.
So He did. He put into action a divine rescue mission.
The Lord saw all of our sin ravaged brokenness and dared to do something that we would never be able to do — He came to us.
When the Word took on flesh and came down to earth, He literally became “God With Us.”
He became one of us. He walked with us in our humanity. He is with us, He knows us, He understands us. Because of Jesus, our Immanuel, we never have to fear being alone, because we aren’t!
He has felt our pain, temptations, sorrow and grief. There is nothing known to us that Jesus has not felt. This truth used to confuse me because I always thought of it from the perspective of his own personal experiences here on earth. And while those experiences were many and unbearable, they still didn’t encompass all of things that we are subjected to as people living in a broken and sinful world.
What I didn’t fully understand until recently is that He bore EVERY sin through ALL time on His shoulders and in His body. He bore the consequences of every sin, including those felt by people who did not commit those sins. He felt the pain of everything we feel and experience as a result of just living in a world where sin is present.
I literally cannot comprehend it! He felt EVERYTHING that I have ever felt and ever will feel, all at once. And that is just a tiny fraction of all He endured on the cross!!! My feeble brain can’t grasp all that I’ve been through all at one time without shutting down, but He felt all of that and everything else from every single person through all time, all while He was on that cross for us. It would be far more than enough to destroy any of us.
But Not Him…
He was able to stand up under it all. And we have that very same strength living inside of us. Isn’t that incredible?!?!?!
When Christ’s physical presence left the earth, He sent the Holy Spirit who would, from then on, be closer to us than our next breath,
We never have to wonder if we’re good enough or let our mistakes haunt us. We can rest. Simply and confidently rest. Knowing, that as long as we put all of our faith and trust in Him, we are forgiven. Immanuel is with us, He is in us, He immeasurably loves us and He will absolutely never leave us!
He came to give us courage where we have fear, strength where we are weak, freedom from the bondage and captivity of sin, peace that surpasses understanding where there is grief and sorrow, and life and light in the dark places that once were dead.
He came to be Immanuel over 2,000 years ago. He still is Immanuel. He will be Immanuel forevermore.
Regardless of our circumstances, pain and heartache, THIS is something we can celebrate with joy!!!