Advent has come and gone. Santa came and we lit the Christ candle a few days ago. And yet, here I am, blogging through advent. Because this is not the end. My grandfather dying, the mourning families in Newton, the broken relationships, the fiscal cliff. This is not the end. We are waiting on love, and so we wait in love.

Sometimes we get it just right, sometimes we mess it all up, sometimes, most times, we do the best we can and it is somewhere between those too. But always, always, things done in love are not wasted. Every drop the Lord can use. We love in the waiting, because we are waiting on love. And it  is enough because I am enough. And I am enough because He is enough. And that is who we are waiting for.

He came once, he is coming again. Hallelujah.

(This is the conclusion of my advent series. You can find the rest here.)

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
from heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
to hear the angels sing.

When the angels came to the shepherds, it was only the few that stopped what they were doing and ran to the stable. Most people in Bethlehem went on about their business, completely oblivious to the heavenly hosts, completely ignorant of the message they brought, the baby in the manger that had come to love the world in a way no one had ever seen, before or since. The world did not in solemn stillness lay, it kept on keeping on clear skies or not people had stuff to do.

Being a Jesus lover, a bringer of the good news, feels a lot like singing into the chaos. The world tells me that people don’t change, that love is not enough to move someone to safety, that love is a band-aid over a bullet hole and that wound will never stop festering, will never heal. Even the love of Jesus, they tell me, even the sacrifice of God, it doesn’t matter. People don’t change.

Still through the cloven skies they come
with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats
o’er all the weary world;
above its sad and lowly plains,
they bend on hovering wing,
and ever o’er its Babel sounds
the blessed angels sing.

I’ve heard it said that to believe that someone cannot change is to short change the gift of the cross. Over and over I am learning that what Jesus came to earth to save me from is myself. The ways of this world are inherent to my being and I feel myself refusing to grasp the love of Christ that I am then asked to give away because it means letting go of the anger I hold so dear. It means grace where consequences are called for. It means trusting that forgiveness is better than giving what they deserve. There is so much for me to stop listening to, if I want to hear the angels sing.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
whose forms are bending low,
who toil along the climbing way
with painful steps and slow,
look now! for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
and hear the angels sing!

Weary is how I have been feeling lately. Weary of loving, because frankly it doesn’t make any sense. It feels like dumping effort into a bottomless well and crossing my fingers that the water will rise. The world, in all of its weariness has been whispering the fruitlessness of love in my ear and I have been believing it. If I don’t shout ENOUGH! than who will? Where is the line that says “you have loved enough, you are released?” I’ve been looking for it pretty hard. If it were there I probably would have found it.

My parents have chosen love for the past year, as they are housing, feeding, and otherwise parenting a teenage boy in the hopes that he will graduate and have a sliver of hope in this world. Topping the list of poor decisions this boy has made is throwing a party that ended with a hole in the wall of my mother’s dining room. My sisters and I see the hole and get angry, we point toward the door. My parents shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. This is what they were called to, to love this boy. I end up crying bitter tears in the bedroom of my youth. How, I ask God, can loving someone well sometimes leave you with nothing but a hole in the wall and the promise to do better? It doesn’t seem fair.

 For lo! the days are hastening on,
by prophet seen of old,
when with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world send back the song
which now the angels sing.

God is asking me to join the chorus of angels, the singing of love. He promises that this life is not the end. He tells me that everything that adds up to an empty promise and a hole in the wall is calculated very differently in terms of His Kingdom. He reminds me that love is always the right choice, even when it does not feel like it.

His angels in the field on the night with the shepherds (regardless of the weather) remind me that God makes good on his promises. Especially when those promises are love.

This season I was grateful to have my daughters hooked on Netflix. Not only can the Peanut name more kinds of dinosaurs than I will ever be able to (thanks Dinosaur Train!) but we have avoided almost all holiday commercials. Somehow I think the Beatles sentiment “money can’t buy me love” is much closer to the truth than Kay Jeweler’s “every Kiss begins with Kay!” What does that even mean? The  ONLY reason people kiss is because one gives the other diamonds? There are about a million babies on this planet whose existence speaks to the truth that close physical contact happens much more often.

It isn’t just at Christmas that we are being convinced that if we love someone we will buy them something special, and by special they usually mean expensive. Perhaps it is just me remembering through rose colored glasses, but I don’t remember Easter and Valentine’s day presents being such a huge deal. A brick of chocolate in the holiday appropriate shape always did quite nicely. When did the Easter bunny start bringing diamonds? When did Santa become a one stop everything I want shop rather than the benevolent uncle who brought one or two things you liked? When did expensive jewelry become the go to gift, rather than a once or twice in a lifetime affair?

When did we become convinced that we can accurately represent our love with stuff?

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My kids got spoiled this morning. Not by us. Santa brought one present a piece to my lovelies, and stockings were stuffed with 1 book, crayons, and a peanut butter-chocolate Santa (the Rooster would be happy to trade you her Santa if you have some more crayons for her to eat). Most of those presents said “from Grandma.” Of everything they got this year, I think this Christmas will be remembered as the Christmas of the shopping cart and baby stroller. They are pushing them around as I type this. The Rooster has her baby doll in there and is bouncing up and down. “Look, see, see, baby, WHEEEEE” as she careens around the house making motor noises. (Apparently it is a very fancy baby stroller!) They love them even though they are not the fanciest presents they received. Grandma picked them up at the last second because she saw them and couldn’t resist. The girls adore them, and that makes this the Christmas of the wheeled carts.

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I spent the better part of an hour the other night frantically searching the house with my husband. On top of bookshelves, underneath couches and beds, we shook out blankets and checked inside pillowcases. Nothing. Well, at least not what we were looking for. We were on the hunt for a three inch bear, pink and second-hand, the Peanut has christened this bear “baby teddy” and likes to sleep with it and the mommy teddy every night. It isn’t anything special really, but the Peanut loves it, and that makes it special.

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Some new friends, who feel like old friends spent a couple years in a far off land. There, they learned to call God, “Dad.” It is catching with us, as we bow our heads together. “Dad.” I was reminded Sunday that it is the birth of Jesus that makes this possible, my ability to approach the creator of the universe in such a familiar manor, “hey Dad?” And I am his child. If I listen hard enough sometimes I hear him answer just like I to my girls “yes lovey?”

Perhaps it has been said before that you can’t buy love…but it is costly. My savior came down as a baby in a manger, to suffer all the indignities of humanity. So that I could call the  great I am, Dad. In everything I do, in everything I botch, I am loved, and that love makes me special. It has very little to do with me, the loved, and everything to do with the Lover and how He chose to love me.

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It’s Christmas…so I am asking. De-lurk for me? Leave a comment, or better yet sign up for the email. I am working on a book proposal and trying to get the courage to send it. Being able to put bigger numbers in the platform box would help!

Can I be honest with you for just a second? I know, I know you expect nothing but rainbows and unicorns over here. I usually forsake the reality and paint life like a Lisa Frank folder on the first day of kindergarten 1984…. If I am honest, I was sort of hoping the Mayans were right and today was the end. I know, even typing it I roll my eyes at the dramatics of the statement. But it is true. Lately my prayers have sounded something like this: I am done, this is too hard, I am hoarse from shouting into the darkness and I can’t fight for joy anymore.

This isn’t the depression talking; this is something else. It seems I have been tuned in this year to certain words in the carols I have sung forever and forever ignored, words that speak of the earth as weary, groaning, needing relief.  Seriously Lord, how much longer are you going to make us wait? How in the world can I find joy in this place? This doesn’t even make any sense.

This morning, as I pulled into the driveway of the house I grew up in, I saw a glimmer of what I am looking for. When I was in the first grade, the giant pine tree in the side of our yard  fell down in a thunderstorm. That year the Easter bunny hid our eggs in it. The same year my sister Jill went to an arbor day celebration and came home with a pine tree sapling. She planted it next to the stump of the old one. I don’t think that anyone but Jill thought it would actually grow.

For about three years, when there was enough snow that school was canceled Jill would get up anyway, put on her boots, and dig that dumb sapling out of the snow. I stayed in bed and rolled  my eyes. This digging was worthless.

The tree is now full grown, as tall as the other trees that were full grown when my parents bought the house. The tree made it, the digging mattered.

I am not the first person to wait on the Christ child. The Israelites did it the first time, the believers in the new testament were sure the second coming was eminent, my dad says as a child of the cold war he was a little stunned when he made it to thirty. I am not the first to look around and decide that my actions, desires, prayers mean nothing against the darkness of the world.

The digging out that I do, the candles in the dark that I light, the whispers in the darkness matter, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Perhaps, especially then. They matter because they point in both directions, to the savior who already came, to the promise he is coming again. They matter because occasionally they grow into big and beautiful things, a testament that someone cares.

Today, I feel like lying down, like saying, “It will snow tomorrow, so why the heck should I dig today?” I dig today because this is not forever. I dig today because I know that one of these tomorrows joy will come down again, just like he did the first time, just like he promised.

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One practical way to light a candle in the darkness is to write an encouraging letter to the men who are investigating with The Exodus Road. I can’t imagine the darkness these guys face every day as they seek to end sex slavery. They often feel alone and the silence that is necessary to keep everyone safe and the investigations on the right track only makes the candle they hold that much heavier. So tonight, I will choose joy for them, and write a letter in my own hand to tell them that they matter. And in the digging, I hope to find joy while I wait for the one who will make it all right.

Care to join me?

Last night I finally got around to lighting the candle of Joy. I try to do it on Sundays, but life occasionally interferes. According to my churches advent guide, this is the candle of the shepherds and the kings. All of the visitors joyously coming to see the new baby who also happens to be God are represented by the tiny flame on my dining room table.

I always imagine there were a lot of shepherds . Perhaps that is because in an effort to include all children in the Christmas pageant most churches go about it like this. Pre-schoolers: you are the sheep. 2nd and 3rd graders: Shepherds. Anyone else not picked out of the hat for something there is only one of like Joseph or the inn keeper, or wiseman number 2, you make up the angel choir. I have seen a lot of Christmas pageants and that is pretty much the way it goes. But I am starting to wonder if maybe we got it all wrong.

There are seasons where I have been the shepherd. Where God has shown up in my life big and glorious. Healing, visions, dream and words. I am blessed to say that there have been shepherd moments in my life. God can and does show his wonder to people in ways that can only be described as miraculous. There are moments in this life where his presence is so big it encompasses the entire night sky. Where all you can do is shout the truth of it all, the goodness, and run straight to the savior and fall on your face in gratitude. Joy comes bursting through you and out of you in direct response to an incredible encounter with God.

This season, for the first time I am drawn to the wisemen, the kings, the strangers from the east. It isn’t that I think I am any more educated, or smarter than the next guy. It is more in the way that God appeared to them. A tiny light in a very dark sky, a glimmer of something that caused them to start their search. Lately God has been looking more like a pinprick of light than a band of heavenly hosts. He has me on a journey through a land that is unfamiliar to me. There is enough light to follow, but it isn’t quite as blindingly obvious as it has been in the past, but still I follow, I seek, I wonder after the sign.

No one really know how many of anybody there were in the stable in Bethlehem. We know there was more than one shepherd. We know there were three separate gifts. Somewhere down the line we have decided that the shepherds were numerous, the wisemen few. I wonder right now if that isn’t reversed. When the holy of holies sends an army of Angels to sing about something, that you can prove in the flesh with a trip down the street, perhaps you only need three or so people to deliver that story to the masses. There seems very little room for doubt.

Maybe it was the wisemen who showed up en mass. Perhaps it took a whole group of them to decide this was in fact worthwhile, this one star was worth a very long trip where they weren’t even sure what they would find at the end, what the face of God looked like. I wonder if they took turns leading the way, spotting the star. I wonder if there weren’t some grumblers at the back some days, who had just had it with the whole journey and were whispering that maybe everyone should just give up and go home. I wonder if they took turns, being the leaders, being the grumblers, feeling sure of the way, and feeling lost.

Maybe one day I will be in charge of the Christmas pageant and I’ll go through the Burger King drive through and anyone who is tired of wearing their sister’s butterfly wings will sport a crown, and only the lucky few whose names are drawn from my hat will wear tea towels tied to their heads and carry their grandfathers cane as a shepherds crook. Maybe everyone’s nativity is different and sometimes you are the Shepherds, sure of what you see, and sometimes you are a wise man, hoping that you are following the right glimmer in the sky, and sometimes, sometimes you are Mary herself, birthing the things that the Lord has placed within you.

It is hard and confusing and painful, it is joyous and miraculous and clear. Because at the end of the journey, of the message, of the birth, there is Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. Sometimes you are the shepherd and sometimes you are the wise man but always, always, Jesus is there, right where God led you.

I bump my hip against the door of the local Starbucks. My hands are full. Sick baby in one hand, laptop bag in the other. I am hoping to get some work done. She has wanted nothing more than to lay with her head against my chest since three o’clock the previous morning. I need some coffee and a change of scenery. Being home reminds me I took the day off of work to take the baby to the pediatrician.When I am home I constantly check the time against the group of students who are in my room and wonder whether or not my presence is strong enough to control them even when I am not there.

The Seasonal drinks are available and the Christmas music is blaring. I order a peppermint mocha as tall as my forearm. My cup invites me to Rekindle and then in parentheses underneath (joy). I take a sip to test the temperature and watch as the baby squirts her juice box all over the industrial cement floor. I go to get napkins before anyone slips on the puddle. How exactly, I wonder, is a 6 dollar  mocha supposed to fill my  life with joy? All it does is give me a stomach ache.

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I am away from my babies when I hear about the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school. I am in my grandmother’s condo where the  ones my grandfather left are gathering together. We come to make sure that Grandma isn’t grieving alone….it is certainly convenient that this then makes us less alone. We try to talk about it quietly because there are babies in the room, my cousin Kim’s babies, who are old enough to hear but not understand. Maybe they should shoo me out of the room too. It seems I am not yet old enough to understand.

My sister gets in later that night and the three of us, John’s girls is generally how the family refers to us, are together and need to practice the hymn we are singing for Grandpa’s funeral.

This is my story, this is my song, praising my savior all the day lo-o-ong. 

The TV is muted, but the images are not and we are standing together singing about perfection, and rest, and being happy and blessed and loved and in our savior’s arms and there are stills of weeping mothers with empty arms flashing across the screen. Em can’t take it any more and weeps in the bathroom looking for tissues. I sing, broken and through my tears, and Jill demands that we not leave her hanging like that later in the church in front of everyone. We promise we won’t, we try hard to mean it.

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I get back into my classroom and am suddenly very grateful that I have a windowless book room attached. I am also aware that my room has three potential entry points if the people on the other side forget to close the doors behind them. I make sure my key can lock those doors. I jump every time one of my students comes in or out, even if I told them too. The PTA president chokes up as she thanks us for what we do every day and I feel the weight of holding other people’s babes in my care. Even for an hour at a time, even when some of them look almost grown, they still belong to someone who would call them “my baby.”

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I stand outside a Starbucks in New York City as we wait for the shuttle to La Guardia. I see the words on the window rekindle (joy). I am struck by just how ludicrous it is that someone would claim to sell joy. I am struck by how much I wish the claim were true. All my griefs mix together and settle into a cold, dull ache. I consider going inside for a peppermint mocha the size of my fore arm, but I already have the stomach ache.

I am longing for a joy the size of a venti peppermint mocha. One that is familiar and delicious. A joy I can hold in both hands and feel the warmth of it before I even consume it. This is not the joy I have this season. I can feel my heart longing and groaning for the joy that I am promised, praying desperately “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” I am clinging to the elusive sliver of the promise of joy, the promise that was bought in the savior incarnate, in the birth I am celebrating, in the promise I whisper “this is not the end.”

I light a tiny candle on my kitchen table for joy. I sing into the darkness even when I am sure it is pointless. I hug my babies and check to see that I can lock my doors. I cry with my grandmother. I look for the joy that Christ has promised despite all that is this world. I promise not to lose that joy. I try hard to mean it.

I took my friend to dinner with us the other night. Sometimes I can’t quite handle the space between home and bed time when I am on my own, so I tempt my childless friends to dinner with me and the girls by offering to pay for their meal. On her way out of the door she looked me in the face and said “I hope you have the time to be sad.”

I am up with my grandmother grieving like this family does. We touch each other a lot. We pick at each other about dumb things. We insist on being in the same room. We make mildly inappropriate jokes. (My sister suggested to my grandmother that they better use the Bible verses about sexual purity at the memorial service to remind my 89-year-0ld grandmother of her moral responsibilities in her new-found singleness. Later I heard my grandma tell a visitor that if she marries again that he has to be “healthy and wealthy, I’ll tell you that much right now.”) Often our laughter runs right into our tears and our tears run right through our laughter. I keep forgetting to not put on mascara. There really isn’t much point.

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Christian is holding down the fort beautifully, but the world is swirling around us. When I called this morning our washing machine had broken and the Rooster had already spilled his coffee. Chaos is the standard at the Norman house these days. I am told it too shall pass as the girls get older, and one day I will long for it back. I am trying hard to believe that.

In the midst of the washing machine fiasco I suggested that perhaps it was Mary the Mother of Jesus clogging up the pipes and was told that she had been found underneath the couch. Apparently, after the pregnant donkey ride, the unattended birth, and the foreign visitors, she needed a minute. Maybe to ponder it all in her heart.

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I saw a shooting star last night. The stars here are so much brighter without all of the city light pollution I get at home. Jill and my cousin Carrie didn’t see it. Just me. It reminded me of the nights the cousins used to go down to the lake to see the meteor showers my mom had inevitably alerted us to. We used to go down to the beach and then tell my mom she had to go up to the house so we could lay on the picnic tables and have exclusive cousin time.

We would lay on those picnic tables with their bases buried in the sand and look at the sky. Without looking into each others faces somehow it was easier to speak into the darkness, not that we said anything important. We mostly talked about what we had done during the school year. We started a lot of sentences with “do you remember when” and end them with fits of laughter. We would wait for the stars to streak through the sky. But the good parts came in the waiting, between the streaks of glory through the sky we were content to just be with each other, hear each others stories.

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Last night I sent out a desperate tweet. When you are tweeting to know what the sign is…that tweet is probably the sign, no need to hit send. This morning I woke up to the Norman Family Creed running through my head. Well God has never screwed us over before. (Did I mention there is a lot going on back home?)

Grandpa was an excellent provider and Grandma is well provided for, but she is a little worried about the day in day out of it all. Coming home to an empty house, eating alone. Those things are going to be hard and there isn’t much to do about it. It must be done. Waiting for her life to change, this holding pattern has been hard on her.

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In this life I sometimes do see those moments of God’s glory streaking through the sky. I lie on the picnic table and wait and watch and there they are, sometimes dozens at a time, a whole shower. It is in those moments where I am surest of the security of that base in the sand, of the place I have chosen to lay. But lately it has been the in between, the waiting. I need to remember that perhaps the shooting stars are not the point, but the space in between. We talk, we laugh, we speak into the darkness, we hear each others stories and point our face to the sky, knowing it is only a matter of time before the next star streaks across the sky.

I don’t know a lot about Bethlehem. I know what I picture in my head when I sing those pretty songs. I know what the Christmas cards look like. In another corner of my brain I have what I have heard from various Christmas Eve services and advent devotionals. Bethlehem was a dirty town notorious for crime and poverty. It was not the place to birth the baby, not the place we would expect to see a Christ child. But there he was, in the middle of a place no one would expect to see him.

In terms of Atlanta, Bethlehem was likely more Old West End than Virginia Highland. Yet that is the neighborhood I most want to avoid, especially at night. Part of this is for my safety, but part of it is because I just don’t want to deal. Selfishly I don’t want to deal with the chaos, the risk, the pain of the situation. I need to be reminded that Bethlehem is where the Christ child chose to show up.

I’ve got some Bethlehem’s in my own life, my own heart. I don’t want to deal with the chaos and pain in some relationships or situations…so I ignore them. I don’t want to deal with the hurt I feel from those places, so I don’t go there.

But I wonder if I am missing the Christ child, just like so many people did who were not going to go to Bethlehem, because they did not want to deal with all of that. I wonder if that isn’t still where the Christ child is….right in the middle of my own personal Bethlehem.

I bought a Fisher Price nativity this Christmas Season. The Peanut has been fascinated with the nativity on the entertainment center and Christian was getting a little tired of holding her up multiple times a day to see “those guys.” I buy almost nothing new for the girls, and even fewer toys, so this was a big deal at our house. When I found it waiting for me on our doorstep in the humble Amazon box, inspiration struck.  I would wait until the girls went to bed, then put the batteries in and set it up just like the adult version, only on the floor where the girls could play with the figures. It would be magical! An early Christmas surprise, the idyllic miracle in Bethlehem.

I woke up the next morning to the Rooster yelling for me from her crib, and when I got downstairs, she had not managed to rouse her sister. I let the Peanut sleep. The Rooster and I played on the couch and waited for the Peanut to wake up. When I heard the Peanut having a conversation between her two teddy bears, I slipped in to get her. “I have a surprise for you!” I told her. “We got a new toy!”

I walked around the corner to see the Rooster in all of her glory. She was standing in the middle of the stable, the fence posts I snapped carefully on last night, snapped off. One in each hand. The wise men were slew all over the living room, and the angel that had once been stuck to the top of the scene was nowhere to be seen. A Godzilla sized toddler had taken over the Christmas story. She turned her head toward her sister and me, “Raaaawr!”

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I have about a million things running through my head right now. I am flying out at 10 am tomorrow for my Grandfather’s funeral, and I get back three days before we leave again for Christmas. I don’t have the ornaments on the tree, the Christmas shopping done, the wrapping finished. I don’t even have the ingredients in the house for the baking I hoped to get done. Good luck getting the presents I have half wrapped out before we leave. If I start thinking about packing tonight for myself and then coming home to do it for my family I just freeze.

There is a lot of chaos around these parts. What will happen next? How will I manage? When does this train slow down? How long is this tunnel, and how close is the next one? Is there enough time for me to see the light of day?

I thought I had everything set up this December like the perfect Fisher Price nativity, complete with a singing manger and an angel on top. I turned around and there was this toddler gleefully running through my plans, pieces of the picture in each fist. Raaawr!

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With hope, joy and love I think of the presence  of something. With peace, I think of the absence of things. The absence of things gone awry, the absence of screaming and even any noise too loud, the absence of chaos. Peace lies in silence, in holiness, in a place where all is calm. And that isn’t my house anytime soon. I’ve never really been great at the whole quiet thing and my two loud children are a testament to that.

Does this mean I just have to wait on that piece of the promise God gives us? Is this candle for a time when the Fisher Price nativity is no longer a part of the requisite holiday decor? When these questions flood my mind I am reminded of Mary, in Bethlehem, having just given birth in a freaking stable….for God’s sake.

In her I am reminded that the chaos can be where the peace shows up. When the plans get deconstructed and the kids are too loud, when the things we thought we knew for sure crumble to dust in our hands, when the raging toddler of worry comes stomping into my head and tells me that I am not good enough unless the now impossible plans get miraculously finished, I am reminded of the chaos that Mary was thrown into. An unexpected pregnancy, a mandate to travel for miles, a less than ideal birth suite.

The chaos never really ended for her. A trip to Egypt, a return home later than usual, an oldest son rejected from his home town with rumors spreading that he was a crazy man, only to see him die an excruciating death on the cross. I’ve never fully considered the burden that Mary bore after those initial 9 months.

And yet she sits at the very beginning with the words of peace on her lips, Lord, let it be.

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I am learning to pray that peaceful prayer, the one Mary answered her angel with. If I have to pack, let it be. If things do not go according to plan, let it be. When I am tired and worn and the kids are screaming for one more round of Jingle Bells, let it be.

I am learning to pray it in the hard places to, if this thing comes to nothing, let it be. If what you want for me is not what I thought, let it be. If I am mourning all through the Christmas break, and you sometimes take the things I love most, let it be.

May the Peace of Christ be with  you. Especially in the midst of the chaos.

I was in latent labor with my youngest for almost three weeks. I went into the hospital over labor day weekend because I felt like I was in labor. They sent me home, but it scared me enough that I decided to stop going to work an hour from my home and midwives lest I be that girl who gives birth on the side of highway 400. Besides, this baby was coming any second. My baby came on her due date three weeks later, September 20th, only because I went into the hospital still contracting, but not seriously, and refused to leave until my midwife broke my water against her better professional judgement. Thankfully I did not blog through all of this. My Facebook posts from that time are pathetic enough.

There is this thing that people say to you, when you are hugely pregnant and completely miserable. They smile at you and say, “well, no one stays pregnant forever!” Which, I suppose is true, but it still makes you want to smack them. How, do they know you aren’t going to be the first? But of course, you aren’t and then you have this hilarious one year old toddling around and you laugh at the whole thing. It becomes a one-up story for the times you are at parties with other moms,” oh yeah, I was in labor with that one for three weeks!” Hilarious! You forget how hard that waiting was, just how much work it is to wait for something you are completely sure of.

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Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

We lost my grandfather this last Tuesday. My sisters and I will be singing “Blessed Assurance” at his memorial service this coming Saturday. We are mourning the loss, but my family has a peace about it that can only be described as supernatural. Death has a way of bringing you face to face with your beliefs.

Do I really believe this? Do I really believe that the God of the universe came down as a baby to give to the world the gift of eternal salvation just 33 years later by his death on a cross and resurrection from the grave? Do I really believe that my grandfather’s belief in this story, my belief in this story, ensures that I will see him again?

Turns out, I do.

Angels, descending, bring from above, Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

I do, and I believe that the universe has been echoing this story of mercy for as long as it has existed, from the birth of babies made the standard way, to the northern lights Margaret Feinberg wrote about in her new book Wonderstruck. She writes beautifully about these echoes and whispers. (I had no interest in ever seeing those until I read the first few chapter of this book.) I have been hearing these echoes and whispers this week as I hold back the grief until I can get out of my classroom and with my extended family.

Watching and waiting, looking above, Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.

It is a hard reminder that we live in a fallen world, death. But even as I tell the students who have caught me crying that it is sad, but happened the best way possible I can feel the twinge in my spirit. This was not the original plan. And I hear the echo, you will get to see him again. Not just him but my grandmother on my mom’s side we called Grammy, my great grandmothers I only have the faintest memories of, my cousin Rachel. We will be together one day.

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So we wait. Watching and waiting, our postures spell out the hope that we have. We look above, knowing that there is something more. It is a posture I have seen in the bodies of the people who have lost the most. They also have the most to hope for.

Lately, this waiting feels like work. I often think of hope as a light and fluffy word, but there is a deep weight to the truth of its promise. There is a work of a heavy burden getting ready to push its way into this world. It is hard, it is slow, it is painful. But this world is not forever, no one stays here forever, which is as beautiful a sentiment as it is a terrible one.

Sometimes hope is delightful, but often it is hard, and painful, waiting for something you are completely sure of. But then, it is here, it is beautiful and wonderful and perfect, this thing that you hoped for was more than you imagined and the waiting fades into a distant memory.