in joyful hope.

Twinkling lights. The scent of pine and gingerbread wafting through the air. Stockings and presents and parties. The days leading up to Christmas can be the most glorious anticipation or the stuff of emotional torture. 

This Advent season finds me in a different place than it has in years past in all the ways a place can be different. There is an underlying ache that I know is common when people talk about their holidays. Someone is missing. A beloved home is no longer ours. Dreams that we thought were ours were not meant for us. People go out of our lives for reasons both good and heartbreaking. But these are sorrows that we all carry throughout the year. So why is it at Christmas that it feels so much more tender?

The easy answer is that we’re surrounded by images of happy families, beautiful homes, and extravagant presents. Our imperfect, messy lives just seem more of a mess in contrast. Greeting cards proclaim, “Joy!” while our hearts are still just our ordinary, broken hearts. It may be that we are just confronted with more things demanding cheer than other times of the year. 

But what if it isn’t just the societal expectation that we slap a smile on our face and sing some carols? Because, if we’re being honest, we know the world is always going to want us to smile and act like we’re having a good time. No, the reason Christmas is different is because of the longing. 

Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, is supposed to be about longing. About sitting in the darkness, hoping for what is coming. The dark days beg to be lit up with beautiful lights, illuminating the part of our hearts that desire to exclaim, “Joy!” without reservation or justification. Our souls are wired for this longing, they are made of the stuff. But it’s hard to talk about it in anyway that can really grasp at what it is we’re trying to fill.

So, instead, we say that the holidays are tough because we miss someone we’ve lost. We say that Christmas will be hard this year because there’s no money to buy gifts. We say we’d rather not celebrate at all, because it hurts too much to imagine the empty place at our table. It’s about our losses, but more than that, it’s about the hollow space that we ache so badly to fill with… something. It’s the reason we’re all so prone to bouts of nostalgia so intense that we find ourselves weeping over our children’s handprints on Christmas ornaments or our grandma’s handwriting on a recipe card. 

Nostalgia, at its best, moves us toward gratitude for the gifts we’ve been given in the past and shows us the ways in which life has been good. But at it’s worst, it keeps us looking back and imagining our past as a time without trouble or worries. We try to fill today’s emptiness with yesterday’s happy memories. Christmases past are all well and good, but it makes it hard for our present to measure up. How can this season, with its low budget and heartache, live up to our expectations, without the rosy glow of memories that have had the benefit of hard edges rubbed away and softened by passing years? And more importantly, where is there room for hope?

Hope necessarily looks toward the future. It’s what hope is. Advent is meant to be a time of longing, yes. But hopeful longing, not longing for the past. Looking forward, not behind. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ache for what we’ve lost. In fact, the more days I live, the more I understand that to not ache for anything isn’t something we can even really strive for. It’s part of what makes us human and beautiful and of God. 

Rather, what I want to pray for in these last days before Christmas is the ability to sit with the longing in my heart and rest in it. The coming of Christ isn’t something that happened in the past. It’s something that happens continually, that’s always in our hope-filled present and future. It holds a place for our ache and our joy and makes it possible to keep them both precious and holy. It means I can hold a tattered piece of notepaper, with my grandma’s small, meticulous handwriting scrawled on it and shed a few tears of very real sadness and very real love, then turn on the music and make her cookies. It means I can feel the deep loss of someone who won’t be part of our celebrations this year, then make more room in my heart for those who will be. Hope lives in longing and longing lives in hope. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that there is no room for your pain and loss in this season. It’s as much a part of our preparations for Christmas as the lights and tree and time with family. It’s in our humanity and ache that we understand what it really means to wait in joyful hope. 

Wishing you a joyful, aching, tender, beautiful Christmas, from my imperfect, messy heart to yours.