early Christmas morning reflections

The lights are dark at five when I wake up to my life, again.

We’re six days from the ending of the hardest year I’ve yet known. How did we get here? That old familiar question, that feels like cotton candy in my mouth, intrudes into my mind again. No substance — little help, but for the thirty seconds it communicates my emotions.

I pad into the kitchen in my teal socks that match nothing I own but make mornings like this cozy, and I see the tree.

Aha. It’s Christmas.

And perhaps for the first year in my life — this hardest year of my life — I notice that I have settled into this juxtaposition of brilliant light against cold darkness.

That’s right, I tell myself, as the lump grows in my throat. Growth and maturity in God aren’t always indicated by an arrow up and to the right. Standing in the 63-degree interior cold, feeling a shiver through my spine — and also absorbing the brilliant light — is a new picture to me. This is growth.

It’s not an effort, nor is it a work of mine that I’ve grown through reverberating loss. Sure, there have been conscious choices Nate and I made as we faced surprising pain and loss that have helped us to grow, but those are negligible compared to the profoundly passive-but-active work God does inside the suffering. It’s as if we were on a conveyor belt that took us down and to the left — not the up and to the right we signed up for … that “great adventure” — and as we rode the conveyor belt down, the powerful hand of God worked on us.