Blessed Christmas to you, dear Crumbles! Recently I recorded a reading of a piece written for a church Christmas brunch in 2007. This is my best attempt at capturing the narrative of the whole Bible, a love story at its heart, in 15 minutes or less in relatively non-preachy language. May the Lord bless it to your encouragement and use.
"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:7–12, ESV).
"This soul of ours hath love, and cannot but love some fair one;
and O, what a fair One,
what an only One,
what an excellent, lovely, ravishing One is
Jesus."
~Samuel Rutherford, The Loveliness of Christ, Kindle location 348).
In the golden afternoon of the last week of summer, a flash of orange movement caught my eye as I toweled off from the day's hydrotherapy session. A monarch butterfly had perched on the bisque expanse of pool deck. Open, closed, open, closed, went its wings, slowly and rhythmically.
How odd, I thought. Why would it land there, so exposed to danger and even our dog, when blooming plants and its favored milkweed were only feet away? Slowly I stepped down and approached, trying with all my might not to spook my little friend.
From a few feet away, I could see something was not right about the wings. A little closer, and a little closer, and oh! Too close.
The butterfly tried to fly away from me but couldn't. Instead, she skittered across the deck into the pool. As she labored unsuccessfully to fly out, I looked around in a panic for something light enough and long enough to help. In the end, I grabbed the grabber I use to reach the pool thermometer. As gently as I could, I slid it into the water just underneath her and waited for her to climb on securely before I carefully pulled her out.
Now the defect was obvious. Her wings were bent like dog-eared pages. Of course the poor dear couldn't fly!
Hoping against hope that she had recently emerged from her chrysalis and her wings simply hadn't had time to expand and harden, I placed her on the milkweed where she would be safer and have nectar for strength. That evening, Amore fished her out of the pool again. And again the next morning. Her wings remained bent. Do butterflies have birth defects? Did something interfere with her eclosure?
We kept her as safe as we could for as long as we could, until we couldn't find her any longer. We groan with Creation in the knowledge that she likely became food for some larger creature, perhaps one of the murder of crows that haunt our block.
Earth has many sorrows, beloved, but you hardly need me to tell you so. Some are as light as a butterfly wing; some are as heavy as a granite boulder that could crush you if the Lord didn't hold it back.
Earth has many sorrows,
Many and variegated sorrows--
Lame butterflies, lame wives,
Fractured minds and bodies, relationships and promises,
Paychecks landing in purses with holes (or not coming at all),
Thorns and thistles frustrating our labors,
Churches wandering from Truth or disrupting Love with petty quarrels,
Prodigals remaining in the far country,
Disasters, disease, dissension, and despair:
Earth has many sorrows. Where is peace to be found in this groaning world, where not even butterflies escape the pain Adam and his sons and daughters have brought about?
Peace is the benediction resting on those who are not offended by Christ (Matt. 11:6; Luke 7:23). Peace is the beatitude for those who look about at all the brokenness in the world-- the lame who don't walk, the ill still unhealed, the wombs that do not bear, the tornadoes that don't change course, the thorns not removed, all the light and momentary afflictions that pave our path toward glory--
For those who look about at all these things,
Yet still confess, "He is good, and His love endures forever."
Peace is the dividend reaped from treasuring God's promises in our hearts:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:28–29, ESV).
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Corinthians 4:17, ESV).
And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you (1 Peter 5:10, ESV).
Peace derives from the trustworthy character of the person of the Triune God:
God who never lies;
...in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word... (Titus 1:2–3, ESV).
God who cannot lie;
So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul... (Hebrews 6:17–19, ESV).
God who keeps steadfast love in abundance.
The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6–7, ESV).
Peace leans its weight upon the power of God:
God who spun galaxies, oceans, butterflies, and birches into existence with the words of His mouth (Genesis 1-2);
God who commands wind and wave, whales and worms (Jonah);
God from whom no one can snatch His sheep (John 10:34-35);
God who raises the dead (1 Corinthians 15, all 4 gospels).
Peace fixes its gaze forward to the purposes of God:
Resurrection and reunion with the saints of all the ages (1 Thess. 4:13-18);
Recreation of a new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21-22);
Redemption of our bodies (Phil. 3:20-21; Romans 8:23-24).
Finally, peace abides in the presence of God who dwells in us and in whom we dwell,and who will be the crowning glory and light of the age of ages when all promises are consummated and all purposes fulfilled:
"Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me" (John 15:4, ESV).
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you (Isaiah 43:2, ESV).
fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10, ESV).
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3–4, ESV).
We could not ultimately rescue or heal our bent-winged butterfly, or so many other people and circumstances, but we can have peace because of the promises, person, power, purpose, and most of all the presence of God. We can breathe in peace now, in the battered and broken, because of our sure and certain hope in a day when there will be no more butterflies with broken wings, wives with broken bodies, families with broken homes, or children with broken hearts.
Come, you disconsolate, where'er you languish;
come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal.
Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, in mercy saying,
"Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot cure."
~Thomas Moore
A different monarch butterfly: a foretaste of good things to come
"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. [14] For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. [15] If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. [16] But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:13–16, ESV).
"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedience is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever."
~C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," The Weight of Glory, pp. 31-32, emphasis mine
Saturday morning I dreamed of Steinway, my beloved dog of 16 years, my first dog, the dog the Lord used to help me heal from a season of deep brokenness. In the dream, I was the 2017 me, with my current level of joint pain and limitation; Steinway was the old dog and full of days, circa 2008. He wanted me to lift him onto my lap, but he was too heavy for me. With immense effort, he made the jump and snuggled up between my leg and the arm of the chair. As is usual for me, the dream was in color; as is not so usual for me, I could feel the weight of him and touch his fur. The only other thing I remember of the dream is that we were at my husband's parents' home, and it was full of people, as it was for the two memorial services this year. We had taken Steinway with us because he was too frail to be left with anyone else.
I woke missing him more than I have in a long time.
The memories of his final months came rushing back. This loyal dog, who had awakened in the night with me so many times when illness or jet lag or simple insomnia took me from bed, would wake almost every night between 2 and 3 am. He would find his way to the living room and then start yelping with enough insistence to wake me up.
Sometimes he needed to go outside and was telling me the only way he knew. Most of the time, though, I think he was lonely and afraid. A Bible study friend suggested that dogs could develop dementia like people do, and perhaps his days and nights were mixed up.
Whatever the reason, he was unable to soothe himself and go back to sleep without help. I would pick him up and do the rock-and-bounce walk known to all parents and babysitters until his ragged breathing slowed and he began to calm down. "It's okay. I'm here. You're okay," I would whisper.
When he was calm enough, we would lie down on the sofa, me on my back, Steinway on my chest like an infant, my arms around him, stroking his fur. There we would stay until we both fell asleep. Unaccustomed to sleeping on my back, I would wake after half an hour, give or take, and oh so carefully rise and carry him back to his bed in Amore's and my room.
One night when I was unhappy to be awakened and growing impatient with Steinway's needs, the Lord reminded me that this was the least I could do for the dog who had done so much for me, and that my days with him were numbered. Soon I would long for that middle-of-the-night closeness and the weight of my puppyface in my arms.
And then He showed me the parable in the experience. If I, being evil, sacrificed sleep and came at the sound of my dog's frightened cry, how much more can I trust that the Lord hears and heeds the cries of His blood-bought daughter? How much more will He console and comfort? How much more will He be with me in the dark nights of my soul?
That's where Advent joy comes in. The "good news of great joy" the angel announced to the shepherds was that a Savior, a Rescuer, had been born for them (Luke 2:8-14). Yahweh their God had seen their sins and oppression and heard their cries, and He had come Himself to rescue them. He had entered their affliction as a baby, but this baby was the virgin-born Immanuel whom Isaiah foretold: "God with us" (Matt. 1:22; Isaiah 7:14). In the apostle John's words, this baby was the Word who became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:14). This baby was the "consolation of Israel" for whom Simeon waited in the temple (Luke 2:25).
The good news of "God with us," right in the middle of our mess and sin, in the middle of the night, in affliction, in the cries of our hearts--that is the beginning of Advent joy. His presence is the joy and comfort of the people He has redeemed. How shall we respond?
Shout for joy, you heavens!
Earth, rejoice!
Mountains break into joyful shouts!
For the LORD has comforted his people,
and will have compassion on his afflicted ones (Isaiah 49:13).
Charles H. Spurgeon's comments on these promises from Isaiah call us to worship and wonder at the Lord's compassion on His afflicted ones:
Isaiah's joy was too great for him to give adequate expression to it with his own solitary tongue, so he called on the great mountainous masses of inanimate nature to express the greatness of God's love and tender mercy in comforting his people. And, when we come to think of it rightly, we see at once that it is a theme for wonder, worthy of the consideration of heaven and earth that the infinite God should stoop so low as to comfort finite and fallible creatures such as we are. Were there no more worlds to be created? Were there no other deeds of power and glory to be performed so that he must come to this poor earth to comfort the sick, the sad, and the sorrowing? The Lord is great in the majesty of his power, but he is equally great in the condescending character of his love and compassion. After Jehovah's great creative works were done, the creation must not be slack in its music when his condescending works are done also--when from the highest heavens he stoops to those in deepest woe to lift them up from their sins and sorrows by the power of his eternal compassion.
Dear Crumbles, does this Advent find you, perhaps, not feeling the joy the carols proclaim? Does the call to rejoice feel like one more burden too heavy to bear?
Then cry out to your Master and Savior. Cry to Him, and keep crying until the Comforter ministers grace to your heart. Meditate on the wonder that "the infinite God should stoop so low as to comfort finite and fallible creatures such as we are." Consider the greatness of "the condescending character of his love and compassion." Dare to believe the good news of Christmas, that "from the highest heavens he stoops to those in deepest woe to lift them up from their sins and sorrows by the power of his eternal compassion." Seek Him in the Scriptures, in prayer, in His people, and He will be found by you. Lean into Him; lay all the weight of yourself and your concerns on Him, and let Him comfort you. Rest in the reality of "God with us," of "God with you," and let His presence be your joy.
with justice and righteousness from now on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord of Armies will accomplish this.
Isaiah 9:2-6, CSB
The suffering saints cried out, "How long, O Lord? How long until You come to reign and judge? Your covenant with Abraham, is it Forgotten? Grace depleted? Favor spent?"
Then cried a Babe, God's answer in the flesh: The Prince of Peace who came to reign and save; The promises, so many, realized At last as Yahweh whispers, "I am here." ~crlm, December 2011
The Lord has liberally sprinkled this year with blessings: a lovely new home closer to my parents and church, a pool that brought much more time with family during the summer and seemed to soothe my hips, a new home for Amore's mother, a great-nephew on the way, two gatherings of Amore's whole family, a new job Amore is excited about, an online photography class for me, and restoration of small amounts of yarncraft. As consistent readers know, we have also been walking through a number of painful blessings: the loss of Amore's father and eldest sister (which brought about the two family gatherings); the loss of a skilled, close-knit work community when Amore's employer was acquired and his team dispersed; the change of community and routines that even a short-distance move brings; the new challenges and pain of bursitis in both my hips; the departure of more friends from my church community; and the pain of other long-term family burdens which aren't my stories to tell here.
As I have sought to reconcile the hard things with this Advent season, it has occurred to me that the hard years may be the best ones for observing Advent. Advent is the season most characterized by waiting, by longing, by hope. Indeed, in the church of my childhood, the first candle on the Advent wreath was the candle of hope.
What does Paul say about hope?
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (Romans 8:24-25, ESV).
By definition, hope implies lack. If we have all we need or want, hope is superfluous. Impossible, even. Similarly, when we walk through loss, through trials, through the longing for the not yet, we are most aware of the unfulfilled. When we know our lack and God's promises, we are perfectly prepared to learn hope.
Advent hope gleams with the eagerness of the child of loving parents on Christmas morning. But Advent hope is also tinged with melancholy; it is a homesick virtue that recognizes we are strangers and exiles on the earth.
At Advent we look back to the hope of the promised Messiah, placing ourselves in Israel's sandals as she waited with longing for the prophet Moses foretold; for the suffering servant of Isaiah, both priest and sacrifice; for the King in David's line in whom every facet of the covenant would be realized. That retrospective hope prepares us to celebrate the full impact of the birth of Jesus Christ the God-Man, remembered at Christmas.
In hope we look forward out of all this "slight, momentary affliction" to the "eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Cor. 4:17). We recognize our poverty of spirit, soul, and body. We lean into that longing during Advent instead of trying to numb or distract from it. We lean forward with arms outstretched to the new heavens and earth where the Lion-Lamb reigns in glory (Rev. 21). We allow the sorrows and emptiness to grow our longing for God's kingdom to come, for His name to be hallowed.
With Simeon, we wait for the consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25). With Anna, we speak of God with thanksgiving to all who wait for the redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:38).
We wait.
We watch.
We groan.
We hope.
If you are grieving this December, may you not grieve without hope. If your now is a season of joy and fruitfulness, may the Lord enlarge your hope to a longing for the not yet. Amen.
"Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears & sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel’s Strength and Consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear Desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart.
"Born Thy people to deliver,
Born a child and yet a King,
Born to reign in us forever,
Now Thy gracious kingdom bring.
By Thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all sufficient merit,
Raise us to Thy glorious throne."
~Charles Wesley
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord,that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thess 4:13-18, ESV). With our grief over my grandmother still fresh, my family is singing carols this year in a minor key. The yearning Advent hymns suit all the "firsts" we're walking through, all the milestones that make the loss real and raw and new again. We've walked through receiving a box of cards and gifts we'd given her, including our wedding program and photos of the first year we set up the Nativity scene Nonni and Nonno had given us;
setting up that same nativity scene again this year;
moving her dining table and china cabinet, the site of countless Christmas Eve ravioli feasts, into my dining area; letting their last legacy gift buy me a big-girl DSLR camera; making the first trip back to Fort Worth since the funeral and realizing the exit for Nonni's and Terza's house now only belongs to Terza's family; keeping Thanksgiving without a group speakerphone call to her in her absence from our table; sorting the last of her personal effects by my dad and his siblings;
Dad's letting go of the car Nonni gave him when she moved out of her house and stopped driving. It's death was timely and untimely both. Certainly old enough to retire, but so close to the loss of its owner?
The winter birds have come. The juncoes flock to the patio to clean up the seed that falls from the feeder when the bigger birds come to dine. Papa cardinal, Nonni's favorite, makes a daily appearance. The scaups and gulls have arrived at the pond, but this year I won't be calling to tell her so.
Nor that I made the first batch of toffee and will send her some as soon as possible.
And so we grieve. We think the tears are subsiding, and then something prods the still-raw wound and we have a soggy day that seems to come out of nowhere.
Yet in the tears and in the firsts, I remember the words Nancy Leigh DeMoss quoted on the radio, words I didn't need at the time but squirreled away for the day I would:
"As Christians, we do not grieve without hope,
but neither do we hope without grief."
graphic and photo courtesy of Quozio.com
The key lies in the 1 Thessalonians passage which began this post, and in its cousin in 1 Corinthians 15. The apostle Paul acknowledges the Thessalonians' sorrow for their fellow believers who had died (or "fallen asleep"). He doesn't tell them to keep a stiff upper lip and dry their tears. At the same time, he exhorts them "not to grieve as others do who have no hope."
The Christian grieving the death of a Christian has hope, even in the loss, because the Christian has the sure and certain promise of a reunion with those who have died knowing and trusting Christ. Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, all who know Christ will be "together with Him" and "always with the Lord" when He returns.
So we grieve, but we grieve with hope. Beth Moore captures the paradox in her recent study Children of the Day, which examines the Thessalonian epistles:
Grief is the sacred love seat where we fellowship acutely in the sufferings of Christ. We are not glad to be drawn to that seat, but there we find Him if we're willing. Oddly, we also find a faith beyond what we thought we'd lost....
To the degree we have loved, we often mourn; but we can be whole again piece by piece if we accept what 1 Thessalonians 4:13 holds in its other hand.
If one hand of solace holds permission to grieve, the other hand contains insistence of hope....
Life can be painful here. Loss is inevitable. So let us grieve when we must, but God forbid that we grieve as the hopeless do. In His hands, we find solace. In His heart, we find rest. In His time, we find meaning. In His eyes, we are blessed. In His strength, we're made mighty. In His light, morning breaks. In His Word, He has promised. In His coming, sleepers wake" (Children of the Day, 104-105).
Advent, the present season of the church year, both completes and begins the circle of the liturgical calendar. It looks back in remembrance to the birth of Christ and leans forward to His coming again. This December my family is leaning forward more earnestly than we were 12 months ago. This is not a bad thing. An uncomfortable thing, surely, but not ultimately bad. We have confidence that someday, when we see Jesus face to face, we will also see and enjoy fellowship with not only Nonni but all our loved ones who have fallen asleep in Him. Even some loved ones we've never met save through paper and ink or pixels on a screen.
Even in loss, we can light the hope candle on the Advent wreath because for the Christian, death is not "good-bye" but "ta-ta for now." Our blessed hope draws nearer by the day, and then there will be no more death, no more tears. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
