Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 274
December 21, 2012
When You’re Just Ready for the Rest of Christmas
Whenever Christmas begins to burden,
it’s a sign
that I’ve taken on something of the world and not of Christ.
The Farmer, he brings home these four miniature candles with the groceries and he pecks me on the cheek. Crazy, how wonders never cease!
So I set out just these four candles — one by the sink, one atop the cabinet, one by the heart, the last at the window.
And from the sink, I can see each of the four flames bold, oil lamps keeping watch.
Four flickering wicks — they’re like these lamps keeping vigil for the Babe coming under a star.
I stand there with a grocery bag and one question: Why do I usually let the oil go out?
Why fume about the kid’s Latin CDs left naked and ashamed in the study, throw up my hands when the boys rub each other wrong and I’m no Aaron or Hur and it’s my heart that grows heavy and I fall all the time and it needs to be falling in prayer and why can’t I keep watch even one hour? Why rate Christmas on cookies and worth on works and presents on perfection?
Who keeps the vigil this Advent and why am I not the virgin with the lamp, just vigilant just for Christ?
It comes, like a lighting:
Christmas cannot be bought. Christmas cannot be created. Christmas cannot be made by hand. Christmas can only be found —
In the creche, in the cradling trough, in the mire and the stench and the unexpected and unlikely and only in the person of Christ.
And I breathe.
Exhale.
Living slow is the way to carry an extra flask of oil joy and living life slow is a way to see.
And the slower I take the last days of Advent, the more places I find Christ and Christmas and the Light that warms.
The shadows lengthen.
The kids whine.
The soup burns.
The packaging and the twine and the paper and the cookies and the cards explode across the house.
And four brazen flames burn, ready … waiting…. watching.
And it’s like a kindling —
What if I laid down efforts and expectations, perfectionism and performance… and simply waited with arms and heart and eyes wide open?
Christ the Babe comes in Christmas just as Christ the Savior comes on the Cross — seeking only our embrace.
And the only thing really to wrap? Is the heart around around Him.
The Farmer, he heads out for evening barn chores.
And I stand in the mess and watch from the window. He turns and winks.
And I smile and wave, a burning heart in the midst —
and wait for his coming again, the paned glass reflecting wicks keeping bright vigil, extra oil of joy still left out for the love that comes down.
Love that comes down and simple says come rest:
{Email friends and RSS readers may view video here {Blog music can be turned off by clicking the speaker icon in at the very bottom of the left sidebar?) Grateful thanks to this video gift by Tammi and More than Words Photography
Rest in the rest of Christmas – Simply. Come. …..
Christ, the babe, comes in Christmas, just as Christ the Savior comes on the cross: seeking only our embrace.
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 20, 2012
How to Really Hold Jesus This Christmas
The girl, she hands me this two-inch Christmas tree.
A Christmas tree made of salt-dough, painted and varnished.
She gives it to me right at the beginning, right when we meet.
The boughs of the tree in my palm, they are dough, cut and bent — these wee branches extended straight out.
How in the world do you make a tree like that? How long does it take to make a tree like that?
We were standing just south of Quito, Ecuador. And Lidia’s mother, she’s telling me they’ve waited 3 years for a sponsor for Lidia. And Lidia, she’s laying these Christmas ornaments right in my hand, one at a time.
It was the first week of November, last year, and it’s Ecuador and it’s stifling hot and I’m thinking more about July than Christmas.
“Lidia, she went all the way to the market for these.” Her mother tells us this in Spanish, pointing to the dough ornaments.
The mother tries to catch my eyes. She waits.
She waits until I am waiting on her next word — so she can frame just this:
“She bought these for you with her own money.”
And with one line, the dough ornaments in my hand, they feel like gold. Like an incalculable sacrifice.
She’s waited three years for a sponsor? And she’s taken what money she has and bought me a two-inch Christmas tree? I scan Lidia’s face, trying to understand.
“I just don’t want you to forget.” It’s her first sentence to me. She says it in a whisper. Shy. I try to hold her gaze,
She looks away, looks down, down to the tree, fingering the branches of the tree.
“I just wanted you to remember me.”
Oh, Child.
I reach out and touch her cheek and say yes.
Yes, I will remember you.
I would fly away from her.
I would fly home in November and it would snow a bit in December and it would get cold.
We would decorate a big tree in the living room, one by the kitchen table.
We would hang Lidia’s picture off a branch. I would set out her salt-dough ornaments. I would remember her smile and how she looked down.
We would read the stories in the Old Testament of the promise of His Coming and we’d drive into town and walk through a living nativity, go to a re-enacted Bethlehem.
We would kneel at the manger.
I would kneel there and wonder at this God.
This God who shows up in the stench of a barn.
If God avoided red carpets and opted instead to enter the black stable, is there anywhere the hallowed presence of God won’t appear?
If the blinding holiness of God breaks into this world with the cry of a child wrapped in filthy cloths, lying in a dung heap — then couldn’t God reveal Himself anywhere?
If we can’t ever fly from God, if God could show up anywhere— then when it’s exactly most unlikely for Him to come to us — it is most like Him to come to us right then.
I would kneel at the manger and it’d be so clear, right there in that scandalously helpless babe: God steps before us — in ways we can step away from Him.
It’s possible: You can abandon a baby on some backstreet behind a mall, Christmas shoppers passing by oblivious.
You can nail God up to some tree. You can inadvertently turn your back on the beggar and the holy and God right before you decorate with the ivy and the holly and I know.
And I’d kneel there at the reenacted Bethlehem and finger along it on the wooden grain of a manger trough— The God who needs nothing, came needy. The God who came to give us mercy, was at our mercy. And He who entered into our world, He lets us say it in a thousand ways– that there is no room at the inn.
God steps directly before us in the needs we can indirectly neglect.
He steps before us in the desperate child waiting for a hand, in the misfit down the street we don’t have to invite to dinner, in the relative that’s but a loud talking, dressed up broken beggar sitting at the end of the table.
God meets us not so much in the lovely — but in the unlikely.
I would be kneeling there at the manger, thinking of our God curled like a pod between trough planks, our God who paid with Himself, incalculable sacrifice, to lay down on the bark of a tree just to pull us close.
And I would remember Lidia standing there offering me her tree, that angel.
And when we’d walk out of the living nativity, walk away from the baby lying there, walk across the parking lot looking for our vehicle to drive home to our warmth and the music playing low and the lights of our tree —
it’s almost be this moan on the wind:
“I just wanted you to remember me….”
“When I was hungry — did you remember Me?
When I was hollowed out and emptied out and worn right out — did you remember Me?
When I was thirsty for water, parched for fresh grace, bone dry for the real Body of Christ — did you remember Me?”
Oh Child.
Oh, Christ Child.
And we go home from the manger to our tree, the scent of God still on us.
And I’d stand in front of our 6 ft tree and see Lidia’s photo hanging there and that salt dough angel Lidia had handed me, wings reaching out to hold a star –
We are born in time, still, to embrace the Christ Child: we can hold Christ now in every hurting person we hold.
Did I give You food when You were hungry?
Did I give You water when You were thirsty?
Did I remember You at all this Christmas, Child who bore the Tree?
And on a spinning orb of Christmas Trees, our hearts can pound yes — our limbs and light and love reaching straight out…
::
:::
:
It’d be insane to think it unless Christ Himself said it:
“‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for Me.’” Matthew 25
Related:
The Grateful Christmas Project: 7 Ways to Have More Grateful Kids This Christmas
How to Remember Jesus This Christmas for less than $25
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-12-19 [del.icio.us]
.... this interview over at Desiring God ...
Have you found one person to come read these together?
... because this will make you laugh and cry happy and it's so meant to be shared with just one other person. Guaranteed must.
December 19, 2012
…. annnd I think we’ve lost track how many times Shalom has giggled happy through this:
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
‘Jesus is the Greatest Gift’ Christmas Gifts for Neighbors: Free Printable
The kids have Adore Him playing and they’re singing along and off key. And the house wafts of sugar cookies and anticipation and names of neighbors to bless!
“You done drawing now, Mama?” Kai’s leaning hard over my shoulder. “Can we just call it done?”
And I’m thinking so, and we cut out this little hand drawn cookie envelope template.
Shalom and Levi have angel and nativity cookie cutters
all over the table. And Kai cuts out these envelopes for each cookie.
And Shalom slides in cookies shaped like angels and stars and a wee silhouette of that God-Baby Who came to the manger & the Cross & offers Himself as a Savior for the world — and who doesn’t need the gift of Him most, again and again?
It’s written right there on the liner for every cookie envelope:
“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son,
and they will call Him
Immanuel
which means “God with us” “
God with us — is the only comfort for the wounds within us.
Kai looks up from his cutting out of the verse — “Mom? God really came, didn’t He?”
And I nod — He came.
He gave up the heavens who were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand.
He forsook the boundlessness of space and confined Himself to skin and He gave up the starfields and took on shape and wore the bones.
He gave up the River of the water of Life that flows from His Throne Room to float the nine months on the amniotic waters. And He who carved the edges of the Cosmos, He curved Himself into fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light all splitting white.
The mystery so large becomes the baby so small and infinite God becomes infant.
“Yeah, Kai,” I fold one of the cookie templates, “The story of Christmas is about a baby who came — for the greatest give-away ever. To be the Gift.”
This is what I tell the kids making up Christmas packages for the neighbors — He came, love come down.
Love that gave — but not to those who loved Him.
Love that gave — but not to those who could give back.
Love that gave — to those who were the poor, the bankrupt, the enemies.
Love that gave even to the likes of us.
“And I don’t know… ” I am telling the story again now to me.
“Who will give away, and with their lives? Why is the world hungry when God’s people have bread? Are bread? What is there more to be in this life than to be bread for another man?“
And Hope looks up from the oven. “Remember, Mama?” She turns off the timer. “We’re calling Christmas the Greatest Give-Aways — and Jesus is the Gift!”
Jesus is the Gift and we keep giving Him away, down the road and around the corner and the world — He is the best Christmas to give — because when we share Christ, we most have Him.
And on the backside of that little verse liner, we write a Christmas note to our neighbors and tape up the back of the little cookie envelope — and tuck The Greatest Gift cookie envelope in with a little love-something for the neighbors — a hot chocolate mix, a bag of coffee, a good book, a little candle, a loaf of bread.
“Look at how many cookies we have got done now!” Kai grins from the table.
And Shalom, she counts a bit giddy, this giving away that gives the Great Gift…
Click here to download and print out Free Cookie Envelope Template
And this Christmas story to listen to while making up cookies? I’ll pass down the cup of hot apple cider….
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
First Up: A Christmas Podcast over at Desiring God
Because I’m with you, friend, wanting nothing more this year than this:
Christmas is not something we wrap up, but a Person whom we unwrap...
So! Let’s do Just. That. — you & me both. Three posts today… yes, three because who can contain the comforting joy of Christmas? First up this morning: The grace-filled folks at Desiring God had me over for an interview and it got passionate & I got choked up about the manger and the love and the center of what it’s all about— but I’m pretty sure this is what Christmas is all about folks…
I’ve got the hot apple cider poured and ready just for you, friend. The Christmas carols are playing glory. Let’s do CHRISTmas together…. let’s not miss it. We just need to take one …long… deep… breath together — and steep in just. this.
(And, Lord willing, I’ll be back at noon with Post #2 and a free printable that was pure joy to grab a pen and draw up — one that we’re giving to our farm neighbors here and we’re sharing with you if you’d like to reach out to your neighbors too?), and then at supper time with Post #3 and gathering close and heart-full…. Let’s not miss it — Him — let’s unwrap a deeply soul-fulfilling Christmas together. We really need it this year… ) Beginning Here with you and a cup of warm, over at Desiring God.
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 18, 2012
Links for 2012-12-17 [del.icio.us]
@ Wishing Well...
'I Am Adam Lanza's Mother'
@ The Huffington.... A Mom's Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America
Max Lucado: A Christmas Prayer
@ Huffington.... "Your world seems a bit darker this Christmas. But you were born in the dark, right? You came at night."
The Gospel and Newtown and Sandy Hook Elementary
This piece by David Platt? Absolute must-read. Yes, this.
an attempt to put words on the heartbreak
@ Chatting at the Sky...
December 17, 2012
The Truth about Sandy Hook: Where is God when Bad Things Happen?
When the guy with the glasses and guitar stands at the front of the chapel, in the middle of Nowhere Country, and tells us all to stand, I’ve got no idea if I can.
I don’t know if legs can hold a heart this heavy.
I don’t know if anyone can stand straight in a fallen world and why don’t we all just fall on our skinned and bloodied knees?
When grief is deepest, words are fewest. The sanctuary quiet envelops. The guitar guy starts strumming. Rain’s drizzling down the chapel windows.
The plowed fields are snowless, bare.
The soggy gravel parking lot, pot-holed and pocked, it’s lined with all these dirty pick-up trucks. All of December’s muddied and messy and weeping.
Please, Lord — a whiter-than-snow hope to blanket all our filth?
The guitar’s chording slow, slow.
Could we sit in hushed silence, hold hands in this vigil, hang together in this suffering solidarity? What if we wordlessly groaned this prayer that Cain would stop killing Abel, that Rachel wouldn’t refuse comfort, Rachel in Ramah, weeping for her children here no more.
The Farmer looks down at me still sitting. He bends a bit, takes my hand, and sometimes the only way to stand is together.
There’s the song’s first words. The congregation begins it feeble:
“Who, oh Lord, could save themselves“
And there’s Friday in Newtown, Connecticut and a classroom of 20 dazzling children – Ana and Charlotte and Benjamin and Noah — and my very first memory is the body of my bloodied sister and the lump in my throat’s stinging bad and how in the world do you sing?
“Our shame was deeper than the sea
Your grace is deeper still…”
Corrie Ten Boom
, a voice heard here, echoing off our pot-holed mess right here: “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.”
Deeper still. Still.
“You alone can rescue, You alone can save.”
There are chin’s trembling brave. Could mothers sing this in Newtown?
Can we all stand and sing that He alone rescues and 20 children have fallen in Newtown and 30,273 beautiful die today because their bellies are scorched through with fiery hunger, and another 30, 273 tomorrow, and is it okay to say these things outloud and some days my head knows what my heart’s too hurt to hold on to and when we’re all done with answers that pat our heads, what we want is a God Who holds our hemorrhaging hearts.
After a Friday in Connecticut, there’s got to be a thousand Jobs standing in million pews on the third Sunday of Advent with their countless questions that boil down to one:
Why?
Why?
And God looks down at us and He’s the God who comes before we cry and God, He bends a bit and takes our ache and sometimes the only way to understand is fall on your knees and say you don’t. God, He asks Job: “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? … Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice?”
Sometimes God answers our questions with questions.
Because God knows sometimes there is suffering beyond our knowing.
When we want to know answers, God simply wants us to know Him.
When we loudly question God’s culpability, God quietly questions our humility.
When we can’t bottle our tears up anymore, God catches every one in His bottle. God’s catching every falling tear because He won’t let us fall apart.
And the guy with the guitar leads: “You came down to find us, led us out of death, To You alone belongs the highest praise…”
My voice catches. Got your bottle, Lord?
His Truth catches me falling: There is no darkness so deep, that God’s arms are not deeper still, that we cannot raise our arms in highest praise.
What if suffering isn’t a problem to solve, but a mystery to live?
What if even this December, it came, manna falling like snow?
Manna, that word that means, “what is it?” and we picked up what we didn’t understand, what made no sense to us, and we ate the manna, that which we can’t comprehend?
What if we ate the mystery of the manna?
Snow, it could fall like a mystery yet.
My voice wobbles unwavering: “You came down to find us, led us out of death, To You alone belongs the highest praise.” There’s stubborn comfort in the Shadrach, Meshach and Abednegos moments: my love doesn’t waver “even if He doesn’t.”
The sanctuary fills with the busted up hallelujah.
Bare-fanged evil may have – did — slither into that classroom in Newtown. But in the middle of defying worship, I remember it – how a missionary told of this snake— longer than a man—that slithered its way right through their front door and straight to the kitchen.
How she had flung outside screaming and a machete-wielding neighbor had calmly walked into her kitchen and he sliced off the head of the reptilian thing.
But a snake’s neurology and blood flow make it such that it slithers wild even after it’s been sliced headless.
For hours the missionary stood outside.
And the body of the snake rampaged on, thrashing hard against windows and walls, destroying chairs and table and all things good and home.
A snake can wreak havoc until it accepts it has no head — that it’s really dead.
The answer to our suffering is so incomprehensible that it has to be incarnated — the Word must come to us as flesh. The Truest Answer always comes in Story. And that Story that begins in Gen 3:15 with God’s promise to the snake: “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel,” it ends in Revelation with nothing less than Christmas:
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.
And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems.
His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth.
And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.
She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne…” (Rev. 12:1-6)
And there’s your Christmas in the middle of the pitch black.
Even if the tail still rampages, the snake’s head is crushed.
You can go ahead and audaciously light your Advent candles because the reality is that the light is so bright that we are blinded by it, that reality is light and we’re really just broken bits of broken darkness surrounded by holy light and even the darkness is not dark to him — and Advent dares proclaim that there’s a way out of this trap – because Christ shockingly stepped right into Satan’s trap – and snapped off his sickening head.
That scaled thing stood before the woman to devour the child. But that babe birthed in the manger, He shattered the skull of that serpent, and He conquered and He was caught up to God and “the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” 1 John 3:8
The only One Who could rescue, the only One Who could save, He came. Infinity births into our iniquity.
He came into our stench and sin and suffering and He came into our wounds and touched our wounds and took our wounds, and though Job’s tortured questions were answered only with questions — the mystery of suffering that isn’t ours to know — Job is satisfied because God came.
He came – and the God of life tasted death, and the God of reconciliation obliterated the alienation of man by hammering alienation straight into the very heart of God.
He came – because in all our pain, we don’t want some answers like we want a Someone.
He came – and He cups us in our aloneness and our agony, in our weeping and our wondering, in our howl, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken us?” – and He whispers, I am Emmanuel, God who is with you.
And when they pass the bread before the wine, and I tear from the pure white loaf. He knows heart tearing.
Us, like Kierkegaard said, “whose hearts [are] torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape from them, they sound like beautiful music.”
I think of that — When lips make it a habit to give thanks, they form so strangely that even in suffering their moaning is a haunting music.
Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.
The children sing it downstairs on Sunday, Away in a Manger. They sing it clear, like a coming:
“Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay,
Close by me forever, and love me, I pray!”
He came.
“Bless all the dear children
In Thy tender care…”
Can I just ask Him on a Sunday — Where were you, Lord, on Friday when those children… ?
And in the middle of Advent, Jesus who hung on a Tree on a Friday, He holds us heartbeat-close:
“Since the children have flesh and blood,
[I] too shared in their humanity –
so that by [my] death, [I] might break the power of him who holds the power of death—
that is, the devil—
and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
The congregation’s singing it like a loud victory now. “You alone can rescue, You alone can save….”
Never doubt it, wondering world: Even if the tail still rampages, the snake’s head is crushed.
To solely spend our attention on evil pays homage to Satan.
And the guy with the guitar, he says we’ll stay standing for the next hymn and I nod my brazen yes.
In the face – no, the tail – of evil, in spite of everything, there are bold songs still, still.
Related:
What to do with a Broken Heart this Christmas
My own story of giving thanks to God after my sister was killed (and here in video)
And the community making it a habit to give thanks, so that their lips form so strangely that even in suffering their moaning is a haunting music:
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 15, 2012
Where is God in the dark of this weekend?
When you can hardly even ask
where the heart of God is
in all this evil and dark …
God takes our broken hearts
and gives us His own still-beating heart,
His pierced-right-through-and-made-whole heart,
so we can still keep breathing.
His heart this weekend is in us…
in our weeping and moaning and wounded doubts,
in the places where we don’t believe —
when our believing runs out, God’s loving runs on —
His inexplicable love
somehow beating unstoppable.
For real Comfort today, an unforgettable story of a heart ripped out & where God is in all this:
What to do with a Broken Heart this Christmas
Part 1: When You’re Looking for a Christmas Miracle
Part 2: The Christmas Miracle He Promises to Never Withhold from You
Part 3: When it’s Hard to Believe in Miracles this Christmas
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
December 14, 2012
What to do With a Broken Heart this Christmas
That one doctor thought it was a bit of a miracle before they even cracked open the chest and cut a way at his heart.
Because who in the world figures out you’ve got a tumor plugging up an entire cavernous heart chamber when you’re blithely driving kids to hockey on Tuesday night and fine-tuning a tractor engine on Thursday and sitting in the front pew on Sunday?
Maybe you only figure out your heart’s failing when you yell at the kids over state-of-disaster floors, or when you feel like a first-class Christmas failure in the age of Pinterest, or when you and yours never get through the holidays without a whole mess of family drama — and don’t ask me how I know.
Sometimes the only thing you know by heart is that your heart knows it hurts.
So when the general practitioner in the small country clinic had suspected a tumor in the Farmer brother’s heart? The specialist could only say he couldn’t really believe it, could only think of it as a bit of a miracle. People say that when miracles happen: “I can’t believe it! It’s a miracle!”
But that’s always the best place for miracles: God meets us — right where we don’t believe.
When our believing runs out, God’s loving runs on.
They roll the Farmer’s brother into the operating theater at 1:27 in the afternoon.
We can’t think. We watch the clock. The Farmer calls his dad in Florida. They pace together. My mother calls. We pray. I keep glancing up at the minute hand, the way it keeps ticking.
Ticking.
“Did I ever tell you what Max
said?” Mama’s got to be eating something. I only hear her nhuh huh.
“Well, yeah, he clapped the Farmer’s shoulder and said he really might be the only pig farmer he’s ever met and we laughed. And at the end, he prayed over us just like you’d think Jesus would — I told the Farmer that on the way home — that it’s not very often that you meet someone and walk away thinking: “He was so much like Jesus.”
“Uh huh?” Mama’s got to be eating almonds.
“But it’s that story he told — “
Can I get through this without choking up? Max’s Texan drawl was as smooth as the back of my Grandma’s Oil of Olay hand.
And he said that Taylor Storch’s family had headed to Colorado for a little skiing. That the 13 year old had laughed loud coming down the mountain. That Taylor had fallen — crashed — down a straight rocky slant of the earth. By nightfall, she was gone, slipped off this earth and Home, and her parents, Tara and Todd, were signing papers to give away Taylor’s still-warm heart.
Mama’s quiet on the other end of the line. She’s watched them a dig a hole in the earth for her own girl.
“Max said they ended up giving Taylor’s heart to a woman in Arizona whose heart failing so weary that she couldn’t get off the couch anymore — Patricia Winters.” There’s snow falling out the window.
There’s been ugly sin this week and there’s been dead weary and there’s been more than a few moments I haven’t known how to go on.
“Taylor’s mama had only one request.” I lean against the window sill, head against the cool pane, tell my Mama what Max had said, how he had shown us a photo of Taylor with her mama. How Taylor’s mama had called Patricia Winters and asked her if she could come hear her heart.
“Oh my.” Mama murmurs what only a mama can feel. The clock’s ticking on the wall.
And Max had told us how Taylor’s mama flew from Dallas to Phoenix and knocked on Patricia Winters’ door and Patricia Winters walked right past the couch and she opened the door and she opened her arms and she welcomed them in. And Taylor’s mama fell into her arms and the two mothers just held each other, Taylor’s heart beating right there next to her weeping Mama’s.
And then Patricia Winters reached over and handed Taylor’s Mama a stethoscope.
Thrum. Thrum.
Taylor’s mama could hear it loud and long, right there in her ears…
Thrum.
Like a thunder vibrating right through her —
Thrum.
Her daughter’s still-beating heart.
“Oh… I can’t…” Mama chokes out the words. “I can’t even imagine.”
Can’t imagine. Can’t Believe… Miracle.
And then Max had asked us slow and quiet. “What was Taylor’s Mama
really hearing?”
“It indwells a different body, but that heart is the heart of her girl…. ” Max said. “And when God hears your heart, that’s what He hears — the still-beating heart of His Son.”
The clock’s ticking on the wall. Doctor’s will be cutting into the heart of the Farmer’s brother right now.
“Mama?”
“Oh — I’m here.” Her voice’s breaking up. “Just — listening.”
Ticking. Beating.
“I was thinking this week — you know when we were in the hospital with Levi?” I turn from the window, turn the sink tap on, fill the sink as if I could fill an ache. “You know — she was the first one to come visit?”
“Yes.” Mama doesn’t have to say anything more. She knows who I mean, how it it’s been over a year and a half. That cards and letters get returned and invitations go unanswered or declined. That the strangest pain that never goes away is estrangement.
“She loved us, Mama… and I don’t know what went so impossibly wrong but I know that I miss them impossibly…”
Mama whispers it like she wishes she could make the words do more, “I know…. “
The sink water’s not much better than lukewarm.
“I sure wish I knew how to fix this — I shake my head, turn the water hotter. “Because I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
In a heart beat.
I stop. Hands in hot water.
I can hear it in me.
Thrum. Thrum.
Me with a tumor, me with heart blockage, me with a failing heart…
That’s the point:
Your heart can’t forgive the tactless no-so-great Aunt, your heart can’t forgive the words that should never have been said, your heart can’t forgive the remark that was more like a blade and left a mark how many years later. Your heart can’t forgive the step-mother, the side joke, the backhand, the over-the-top family that just gets under your skin.
Your heart can’t forgive. That’s why He gave you His.
When you don’t think you can forgive what she’s said about you —-
When you don’t think you can forget what he’s done to you –
When it’s His heart beating in you — you can forgive in a heart beat.
I look up from the sink. The Christmas tree is there by the fireplace — and it’s right there, what all the hard relationships, gatherings, families needs at Christmas:
The Tree is where God’s grace does heart transplants: God takes broken hearts —- and gives you His.
I would tell Mama that later.
That they cut a 3 inch tumor out of the Farmer’s brother’s heart. That only four days later the Farmer drove his brother back home to his farm. That they prayed thanks for startling grace.
That it’s really true: That right where you don’t believe… is where God meets with a miracle.
That miracles happen in a heart beat.
Related Posts:
Part 1: When You’re Looking for a Christmas Miracle
Part 2: The Christmas Miracle He Will Not Withhold from You
Part 3: When it’s Hard to Believe in Miracles this Christmas
The Grateful Christmas Project: 7 Ways to have more Grateful Kids this Christmas
Christmas Ornaments:
“Wonders of His Love” Heart&
“Tree to Cross” Ornament
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
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