When you (or they) won’t be home for Christmas
If it’s true that home is where the heart is, then anyone who has experienced loss knows this time of year can be bittersweet.
What if I share that we can lose the bitterness and create or recreate the sweet?
When we consider the saying about home being where the heart is, we give a lot of power to where we are, or where we want to be. We long for something (like home), or we long for someone to be near us.
What is it about this grief that make waterworks fall? The answer is we are either triggered by a memory, or we experience what’s called projected grief.
Projected grief is future tense grief. This type of grief makes us sad over what will be. An example of this grief is missing the way a loved one used to take care of the garden. No one is gardening now, it’s early December, but the thought of what won’t be a beautiful garden this spring and summer is a true wallop because your gardener won’t be there to attend to the plants and flowers he or she enjoyed (and you did, too).
Whether it’s memory grief or projected grief, we know what grief does. It takes the moment. In a wave of sorrow we cannot stop, it makes us stop what we are doing.
How, then, can we create or recreate something sweet from something sour? We can engage the text. Since it’s the season of Advent, which is our preparation for Christmas time, we can take hold of the story of Jesus and His birth.
One story we can open is Joseph’s, Jesus’ father on earth. This devout example of strength and sawdust may never have heard anything about projected grief. Who had time for that when, as a carpenter, he had so much to do?
Construction then may very well be what construction is now. High demand. Ordered yesterday. Want it tomorrow.
Still grief, even projected grief, finds its way out.
So, when the man engaged to Mary was sawing and hammering, he was really hammering out his heartbreak and anger at the news of Mary’s pregnancy with a child that wasn’t his. The carpenter may never have named his grief as projected grief, but as he planed, nailed, sanded and finished wooden pieces to his latest project, his soul must have wept. This was not his child. Even if he was a rough and tough tradesman, this was not his baby girl, or his baby boy. He may have thought what may well have been true, that his child—or, actually, this child—would look nothing like him.
Family was vital to the culture of the time. Of course, the couple discussed a future family during their engagement. Date nights couldn’t have been all that fun. There was no movie they could watch and discuss later. With what I can only imagine and hope and joy, he had time to think of what it would be like to have and hold his own baby.
Joseph came around in a short time, however. He heard through his own dream that this was God’s plan. Like so many in scripture, he didn’t turn from, run from, or all-out deny what God called him to do. He ran toward God’s plan.
Still, we cannot forget he experienced the loss of not holding his very own child.
When Joseph imagined what Mary’s future pregnancy would be, should they be blessed with a child between them, he must have longed for the birth of his first child to be special. Similarly, we long for Christmas to be special. Like Joseph when he first heard Mary’s news, we can feel disappointed. Like Joseph, we, too, can experience projected grief. After all, this isn’t the Christmas we wanted.
But God was in Joseph’s story just like God is in ours. When he held baby Jesus—his son—in his arms, the joy was beyond all measure.
As baby Jesus was in Joseph’s story, baby Jesus is in our story, too. Let this baby, Emmanuel, God with us, be in your story so that something will be beyond measure this Christmas.
Yes, grieve. This will happen as we come into Christmas. Give space to this. Go easy on yourself through this, too.
We can also lose the bitterness and create or recreate the sweet by holding the Son of God in our hearts. We may not have the Christmas of our dreams, but, like Joseph, we can let God give us dreams that lead to new and joyful realities.
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