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When the Good News Is Hard to Hear

The Christmas Eve worship services for our church are always highlights of my year.  I typically look forward with great anticipation to the shadowy sanctuary, the sharing at the Table, the flickering candlelight, and the sound of “Silent Night” echoing through the midnight sky. 

But this year was a little different.  Christmas wasn’t as welcome or as merry as is usually the case.  Some of it had to do with recent losses.  Some of it had to do with family illness.  Some of it had to do with financial tension.  Frankly, some of it had to do with 70-degree temperatures.  But collectively, these variables and others made it hard to see the season in a celebratory way.

Still, head up, I plodded through my malaise.  Responsibilities are responsibilities, after all—and I had places to be and things to do and folks who were counting on me.  Even so, each piece felt more like going through the motions than genuinely being filled with the happiness of the holiday.

And that was the way it remained until the conclusion of our 11 PM Candlelight & Communion.  The service went well, with a good number (most of whom were visitors) in attendance and a sweet spirit filling our worship.  The anthem was lovely, I made it through my homily, the sacrament was observed.  Then everyone lit their candles, and we processed singing out the front door.  And as the last note hung in the air and the benediction was given, I sighed in relief that it was over.

But just then one of our children came up to me, along with her grandmother, buzzing with excitement.  She was literally jumping up and down, a smile stretched from ear to ear, thrilled by the evening’s experience.  It was, apparently, her first Christmas Eve service.  And her reaction was joy to the world embodied.

And in that moment, everything that’d been weighing on me seemed suddenly much lighter.  The cares I’d been lugging around and the worries I’d been clutching dropped—and I finally “got it.”  I’d been waiting for external situations to straighten out, convinced that until stuff got better there might as well be no Christmas. 

But the message of the nativity is that of One who comes to us in the midst of our disarray, whether we’ve made it ourselves or life’s simply happened.  It’s a message I’ve preached more times than I can count.  But it’s one that, this year anyway, hadn’t taken root—until I saw in the face of a child the good news that Christ is come.  May this be the Gospel that sustains us day by day.

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