Christmas Thoughts

 I usually write at least one post about Advent or Christmas each year . . . sometimes more. As Christmas is just one week away, I've been thinking about what I might write this year. It's been hard to figure out.

Not because there's a lack of things I could write about. This is a season with lots of things to think about & powerful Scripture to reflect on. There's an abundance of things I could write about but as I've tried the words felt forced, which is the antithesis of what I write here.

Last weekend, I was part of my church's annual Christmas event. It's always a good weekend, even if busy, for so many reasons. As part of it, people who come through can write a prayer request & hang it on the tree. Then a group I was part of takes time to pray over those requests that night.

As I've reflected on what I read on those tags & on my own experiences, I've realized just how heavy things in this world feel & how much pain & struggle people are carrying. So many of us are tired & carrying heavy burdens of things we or our loved ones are walking through. We're tired.

That makes a season where so much is about joy & happiness overwhelming at times. And the expectations for a perfectly decorated house, a big meal, & the right gifts for everyone under the tree feel like to much. There's already enough going on & we don't need more.

Sometimes the songs that talk about having a "holly, jolly Christmas" or a merry time just feel like too much. It feels so far from what we're actually experiencing.

It me that this is exactly the type of situation Jesus entered into. It wasn't tidy or easy. God's people were facing hardship & they were tired. They were far from merry in their lives. 

And that's where Jesus showed up on earth.

That's where he shows up today too. 

He'll meet us in our "I can't do one more thing" moments.

He'll meet us in it all &just be with us.

He doesn't expect us to be merry or jolly.

He lets us be real.

Maybe this Christmas doesn't look like you planned. Maybe the burden is just too much. Maybe the pain feels like you'll never get through it. Maybe there's people you wish would be around the table who won't be there for myriad reasons.

Invite Jesus in. He meets us in the midst of that if we'll let Him. 

That's how He came to earth the first time.

And it's how He comes with us today.

Untangling

 I didn't intend to write about grief here. I definitely didn't intend for there to be more than one post about it.

But, I've always sought to write here about real life & what I'm wrestling with. So, right now, that means talking about grief here.

At the beginning of this month, I came across the book I didn't know I needed. Grief isn't something new to me. I've journeyed it before. So, I had no intention of reading a book on it. I didn't figure I needed it.

I thought I knew what I was doing & how to get through it.

Then, I was in our local Christian bookstore looking at the new releases. There was a book on grief among them. In the moment I saw it, I felt like I was supposed to get it. So I did - without really checking it out first (a rare thing for me).

When I sat down to start reading it a few days later, I quickly realized it was the book I didn't know I needed. I read it twice in a week & I've gone back to parts of it multiple times since.

The book is written by someone who also lost what they thought was their dream job. Although the specific circumstances were different, there was something about how the book was written that connected things for me & gave me permission to to acknowledge that I was grieving.

The book is Grieve, Breathe, Receive by Steve Carter.

In the middle of the book, I read a quote that helped me understand what was going on.

"This is the thing about grief that few talk about - it unravels us as we untangle it, & we find ourselves grieving the loss over what we thought it would be.

We mourn our preferred future and our separation all at once.

Part of honoring what comes up when change happens is wrestling with how we thought it would be." (page 99)

This is where I made one of the most helpful realizations for my own journey. There's more than one loss with grief (something I wrote about last week).

Carter goes on to say:

"Grief is us saying, 'It's not supposed to be like this.'

But it's even more than that.

It's also the untangling that we must do as we grieve." (page 100)

We're untangling the lost of our planned or preferred future.

We're untangling ourselves from the past.

We're untangling what has happened to other relationships as a result.

And that all takes time. And it's okay that it does.

In the process, we need to allow ourselves the time & space to do so.

The Losses we Don't Talk About

 If you've ever walked through the loss of an important person in your life, then you know that we don't handle grief well as a society. It makes us uncomfortable. We often try to rush people through stages of grief, as if they are a linear process we can just move through to get past the grief.

We expect people to grieve the loss of someone. And for the firsts without that person to bring sadness or anger. We may not be completely comfortable with it, but we expect it.

But, in the last six months, I've noticed that we don't really talk much about the other losses we face. And we don't expect them to be long journeys with grief. Nor do we realize that sometimes all we see is the big loss & we don't realize the many smaller losses that are rolled up in it.

I think the best way for me to explain what I mean is going to be to share my story of the last six months.

Six months ago, I unexpectedly lost what I thought was my dream job at the time. In the days & weeks that followed people generally expected me to not be okay. But, as the months went on & I started a new job, I noticed that many people seemed to assume I would be okay now. And were generally surprised when I told them otherwise.

I have more days when I'm okay than days where I'm not now. I feel like I can genuinely enjoy things, smile, & laugh again. But, I also still have many days - sometimes one, sometimes multiple days in a row - where I'm just not okay. That's the reality of grief.

I've also discovered it's not just the loss of my job I'm grieving. It's a long list of things tied to it that I'm grieving.

I lost may of the people I had spent my days with for the better part of 17 years.

I lost the purpose that came with the work that I did.

I lost the familiarity of what I did everyday.

I lost the sense of how my work really changed the lives of people. 

I lost the security of knowing what I did.

I lost the confidence that I could do my job.

I lost the vision of what my future would look like that I had.

I lost my trust in those I work for & with.

I lost many more things than I can name right now.

And most losses, are actually a whole lot of "smaller" things rolled up into the big loss that's obvious.

But, these aren't the losses we like to acknowledge or talk about. Because they're the harder ones to walk through.

If the only loss I was dealing with was the loss of my job, then finding a new job would been all I needed to move on. It's all those little things that mean I'm still grieving.

In his book "Grieve, Breathe, Receive" Steve Carter writes:

"You don't journey through grief, you journey with grief."

Rather than looking for people to be done with grief, we need to learn how to be okay with the uncomfortableness of grief.

How do we do that?

The most helpful thing we can do, is to let people be not okay for as long as they need. And that means we need to be willing to sit with people - even when they're maybe not the most fun to be with.

And we need to remember that grief isn't linear. The commonly referred to stages of grief are helpful in describing the various ways people will feel as they journey with grief, but we can't expect people to move through them in a linear fashion or to just have those feelings come up once.