It’s Christmas Day, the snow lays on the ground glistening and white. Sparkly icy flakes blow in crowds off roofs as the wind gusts into the face of walkers hurrying to get their Starbucks or Timmies. Cars hiss on the snow-wet roads, waiting alongside each other at red lights, impatient to get to Christmas breakfast or lunch or dinner, some enjoying the quicker commute others the waiting at the lights, delaying the family roar for a few more seconds.
Church walls block out the city noise. Candle flames vie with stained-glass sunlight as imperfect voices sing carols and greet each other joyfully before parting to their separate feasts. Or barren homes.
Life chatters, joy laughs, pots clang, children screech, grandparents help little hands rip paper, parents gulp down drinks, and the injured brain hides in the bathroom, driven there by conversations swirling around in an unintelligible cacophony of piercing pains. It’s either that, pleasing the family with the presence of the body without joy, the brain’s needs ignored, or sipping eggnog alone in the blessed quiet of one’s own home with no one reaching in.
If it’s one thing I’ve learned — again — from social isolation, part II, it’s that when you can’t get out, people in real life won’t reach in. A token email, a couple of messages, an offer to answer your call if you need anything without an offer to come over and bring coffee or health care, and then silence . . . until you can once more get out to where they are.
Christmas is no different.
Except that God, that Jesus, is always with you.
You can rage, cry, sniffle, marvel over a blue blue sky, take quiet pleasure in watching cardinals glare-hop outside your window, sink into a Netflix movie, and Jesus is always there with you to share in every emotion or lack. People say God keeps his promises. I don’t know. But one thing Jesus does not do that every human does: abandon the sufferer.
Pain drives people away. Pain and a broken brain invites human judgement and criticism. Pain and injury imprison you. But excluding, exquisitely painful suffering draws Jesus right in there behind the bars with you. Happy Christmas.
