My suitcase wasn’t even unpacked from my maternal grandmother’s funeral when I got the call about my dad’s mom: “Grandma has been in bed all week. We’re driving down tomorrow to say goodbye.”
I do realize the extravagance of this gift I’ve been given, having grandparents I’ve known into adulthood. I feel almost guilty grieving these losses, like someone in Hawaii complaining about the winter.
And yet grief is so rarely a rational animal. There is little comfort in comparing wounds, no balm in “at-leasting” them.At least I had her so long. At least she went peacefully. At least she’s no longer suffering. It may be true, but it does little to erase the loss.
Grandma celebrated her 102nd birthday this summer, but her mind remained as bright as ever. Whenever I visited, I perused the books on her end table: mysteries, historical fiction, chunky nonfiction titles. As I listened to her delineate the tactical strategies from her recent World War II read, I found myself shaking my head, hoping to be as well read when I grow up.
Books are, after all, how she and I became friends. I knew her as my grandma my whole life, of course, but with twelve children and a gaggle of grandchildren, she always had a lot of voices clamoring for her attention.
One summer when I was in junior high, we went to her and Grandpa’s condo to swim, and she noticed the copy of Anne of Green Gables under my arm. I told her about Anne, the book’s spunky red-haired heroine. Before long, I was passing along the entire series to her (and eventually to Grandpa too) when I finished each one. As we had our own informal book club over the course of eight books, I realized how much of Anne I saw in my grandma: both were gingers who had lost parents young and had come out resilient (and a little fiery) on the other side. Both were lovers of literature who got an education at a time when not many women did. Both took a legacy of loss and wrote a redemptive story for the generations after them.
Grandma’s story could have been a book itself. I think about the vignettes I’ve heard over the years—how she met Grandpa in college just before the war, how she waited and prayed for his return after he enlisted, how he mailed her a parachute so she could use the silk for her wedding dress, how they got married on a Tuesday right before Lent (so they wouldn’t have to wait until after Easter), how she and Grandpa had a dozen kids in 14 years, how she lived independently (and read independently) until past the century mark.
She didn’t see herself as a heroine, but then again, aren’t all the real heroes the ones who don’t realize it? “Oh, honey,” she’d tell me, “I just did what I had to do.” On every page, her life was marked by humility and grit.
But perhaps more than anything, she didn’t see herself as heroic because she knew she was part of a larger story. And she knew the Author who was writing it:
You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Psalm 139:16
Grandma, your final chapter is over here on earth. But your story on the other side is just beginning. Only this time you get to read the book before I do.
You were never one to spoil an ending, but I’m pretty sure the story you’re living now in is the grandest one of all. In this story, there’s a happily ever after, but no “the end.”
I don’t know exactly what the literary scene looks like in heaven. But I’m putting in a special request to be in your book club just in case.
Hope . . . makes possible our ability to recognize that the world in which we find ourselves has a story; and if there’s a story, there’s a storyteller. Stanley Hauerwas
I just packed away a piece of baby furniture. This always comes with a whiff of nostalgia—there’s not much warning when one stage ends and another begins. We take pictures of beginnings—the first step, the first bite of peas—but endings aren’t usually so ceremonious. The change happens gradually until one day we realize, Hey, when did he get too big for that bouncy chair?
But this ending felt even more nostalgic than most, because this was no ordinary bouncy seat. It was my Jeremiah-inspired bouncy seat.
The scene, two years ago: I was on the wrong side of 40 and had gone through a miscarriage after having our first son. We were coming up on a year after that loss, and I wondered if it was time to throw in the hope towel and accept that we would have only one child.
Around this time we got a recall notice for Graham’s bassinet. We could no longer get a reimbursement or a direct replacement, but they would send us another product of our choice. I tried not to think too much about the fact that BABIES HAD DIED IN THE VERY BASSINET MY SON HAD SLEPT IN and started scanning the catalog for something suitable for a toddler.
Before I placed my order, however, I was frozen in place by a passage from the book of Jeremiah.
Here’s the context: God’s people were under attack by the Babylonians, and the prophet Jeremiah was in prison. God had just given him a message that his beloved city would fall; the Israelites would be defeated and deported to enemy territory. In other words: it was the worst possible time for a real estate acquisition.
But that’s exactly what God asked him to do: buy a field in his homeland, the one that was about to be conquered.
Jeremiah said:
Though the city will be given into the hands of the Babylonians, you, Sovereign Lord, say to me, “Buy the field with silver and have the transaction witnessed.”
Jeremiah 32:25
Why would God tell Jeremiah to do such a thing? Why waste money on land that’s about to be seized by your archnemesis?
In a word: hope.
God was saying, essentially, “One day my people will return to this land. Even after the worst happens, there is still reason to hope.”
It’s one thing to give a theoretical nod to hope. It’s another to invest in it with real dollars. God might as well have been telling Jeremiah, “Put your money where your hope is.”
Meanwhile, God was whispering in my own ear: Buy the field. This wasn’t a time to be practical; it was a time to hope.
At first I fought the nudge. What if we ordered a baby item and never had occasion to use it? Wouldn’t it hurt to keep stubbing my toe (and my heart) on it every time I went to the basement?
But the whisper wouldn’t go away: Buy the field. (Or the bouncy seat. Whatever.)
And so the chair sat in the basement, along with my hope, for some time.
It was risky, to be sure. We had no guarantees that the chair would get filled. But we did have a guarantee about God’s heart. So we waited and we hoped, the best we could.
I want to be the first to acknowledge that hope doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. We don’t always get the yes we long for. But in this case, God graciously brought us back to the field we’d bought. He filled that bouncy chair with an even bouncier boy.
And we can’t help ourselves: sometimes we still call him Baby Hope.
Hope acts on the conviction that God will complete the work that he has begun even when the appearances, especially when the appearances, oppose it.
In the midst of Advent, we find ourselves in the space between.
Between the promise and the fulfillment. Between the announcement and the arrival. Between the almost and the not-yet.
There is beauty in the in-between time, as we light candles and imagine a future of fulfilled hopes. But there is also trembling, as we put our most vulnerable dreams on the line, crowded by so much uncertainty.
I’m reminded of that haunting line from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:
The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight
O Little Town of Bethlehem
As anyone who has ever waited knows, true Advent isn’t just opening windows on a calendar, ticking off the days until Christmas. Waiting is full of hope, yes, but it’s also fraught with angst. There is so much we don’t know: When? How long? How? And what will the waiting cost?
As we count down the days until we meet our baby, we find ourselves in an Advent of our own. When will Baby arrive? How much longer will our waiting be? Will we know when it’s time? What will we find on the other side of our waiting?
There’s a poem by John Donne that includes this gem of a line:
Pregnant again with th’ old twins, Hope and Fear
John Donne
And that’s exactly what waiting feels like, what Advent feels like: hope and fear, mingled inextricably together. We can’t have one twin without the other. We have no choice but to carry the weight of both.
But from where we stand, on the other side of the Incarnation, we have a hint about how the story ends. While we will contend with both hope and fear as long as we live on this earth, one day fear will be swallowed up forever. One day hope will win.
And so we let those twins wrestle inside us as we wait, knowing that Christ’s birth ushered in an era of hope. And when he returns, all our hopes will be forever met in him.
The Incarnation is the place, if you will, where hope contends with fear.
It could be argued that the year 2020 has needed a lot of things. At first, the lack was immediate, tangible. We needed toilet paper, bottled water, hand sanitizer. But as the pandemic has dragged on, it’s our emotional reserves that we’ve found most lacking. We paced ourselves for a sprint, then a marathon, only to find that the finish line keeps moving.
We are weary. We are divided. We are out of creative ideas. We are dreading a long winter. And perhaps what we need more than anything else is hope.
***
At the outset, it seemed like a terrifying prospect to be pregnant in a year marked by a pandemic, not to mention social unrest and political upheaval. Besides the imminent concerns of not having Daniel with me at doctor visits and wondering what delivery would look like in the era of COVID, I had other, more existential questions: What kind of world were we bringing a baby into? What kind of fractured cultural legacy were we passing on to the next generation?
But as the months have progressed with Baby Hope (as we’ve nicknamed the baby for now) growing inside me, I think this is actually the best way to weather such a fractious year. With each week that passes, I see Hope growing under my very nose. With each kick beneath my ribs, I reckon with life that marches onward. With each day that brings me closer to meeting this little person, I have no choice but to invest my heart in the future.
And I think that’s what God would want us to do, whether we’re pregnant with a child or pregnant with hope. I think he wants us to keep investing. Keep loving. Keep believing.
The thing about babies is that, like hope, they tend to grow little by little, almost imperceptibly. We have to be intentional about seeing the hope . . . and recognizing that this place we’re standing, as tumultuous as it may be, is indeed holy ground.
In her book Showing, author and professor Agnes R. Howard writes about the common yet miraculous events that transpire when a baby grows inside the mother:
A pregnant woman is honored as audience and collaborator, a watcher at a holy place, attending God doing something new. She is present at this creation.
Agnes R. Howard
I believe God is at work all around us, unfolding new miracles every day. Even in 2020—maybe especially in 2020. The question is whether we will recognize them or not. Will we be watchers at this holy place?
The pregnant woman gets the revelation first. . . . The rest of us wait to encounter the new person for the first time. The expectant woman is not waiting in the same way. She already has encountered the new person. She already knows something.
Agnes R. Howard
And so it is for those who have heard whispers of the coming Kingdom. We are waiting for the full glory of God to be revealed, but we aren’t waiting in the same way the rest of the world is. We have already encountered the little pulses of hope. We have felt the quickening in our hearts. We already know something.
So as we mark this first week of Advent, I dare you to choose hope. See it. Seek it. Fight for it. And when the fulfillment comes, be ready to cradle it in your arms.
They lie to you about hope. They whisper in your ear that if you don’t get your hopes up, it won’t hurt if that longed-for thing doesn’t come to pass. Keep your expectations low, they say, so the fall won’t be so steep. Don’t get too attached. Muffle your dreams under layers of bubble wrap. This is the only way to venture into the future and come out unscathed.
But according to a reliable source, hope is one of only three things that remain in the end, after everything else falls away. If I’m understanding that right, it means that hope lives on into eternity, even after the thing we’re hoping for has passed away. If that’s the case, maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to brush it off.
***
“It looks like you’re miscarrying,” the doctor told me, not unkindly. It was the height of the pandemic, and we were both wearing masks. I regretted putting on mascara, but it felt like a special occasion, seeing as it was the first time I’d left the house in approximately six weeks. The doctor awkwardly handed me a tissue, trying not to make contact.
“Come back in two weeks for another ultrasound to confirm.”
Back in the car, I regretted (even more than the mascara) the fact that Daniel couldn’t be there with me. We’d initially wanted him there so he could see the baby’s tiny profile on the screen and watch the pulsing heartbeat. But now I wished he could drive me home, because they haven’t yet invented windshield wipers for the human eye.
***
I didn’t enter this corridor of hope blithely. I’ve had my share of ultrasounds that resulted in smudged mascara: one with dire conjectures about our baby’s future and one that resulted in the dreaded silence of a no-longer-beating heart.
In those two agonizing weeks between ultrasounds, I wondered how to pray, how to put one foot in front of the other, how to breathe. I wasn’t sure it was possible to hope, and if so, whether it was wise. If I cracked open the door to hope, wouldn’t it just be an invitation for my heart to get steamrolled in two weeks?
I whispered these fears to Daniel after Graham was safely tucked in bed. I know he was just as scared as I was, but he offered words of bedrock wisdom, words I clung to every day of those two eternal weeks: “We will choose hope until God gives us a reason not to.”
***
Hope, I believe, is never wasted. Every time we hope, even if the hope is just a tiny quivering thing, we are building our hope muscle. Even if the thing we’re hoping for doesn’t become reality, the very act of hoping changes something at the core of who we are.
And if the foundation of our hope is ultimately in Someone rather than something, we will never be disappointed. Whether we get the thing we’re hoping for or not.
Faith is both the dreaming and the crying. Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.
Frederick Buechner
***
At my appointment two weeks later, I walked into the same ultrasound room, with the same mask on, and was greeted by the same technician. I could hardly bear to look at the screen, knowing in a matter of moments it would announce either life or death, hope or grief. I didn’t want to know, and I had to know.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. My eyes flew open at the unmistakable sound of a tiny heart pumping at 160 beats per minute. “Is that what I think it is?” I whispered.
Sure enough, flickering on the screen was hope incarnate, hope pulsing inside my own body. I hadn’t worn mascara because I anticipated tears that day. I just hadn’t guessed that they would be tears of joy, tears of a hope fulfilled.
Now, by some undeserved miracle, Daniel, Graham, and I are waiting for our new arrival, due at the end of year. And the nickname we’ve given this little one?
This pandemic has taken so many prisoners, and my heart is heavy for everyone who finds themselves languishing behind bars right now.
The elderly person who can’t have visitors. The single parent who is never off the clock. The person battling anxiety. The person with a compromised immune system. The person stuck at home in an abusive relationship. The person who lives alone and feels the ache of loneliness.
Perhaps this virus isn’t responsible for our chains, but it certainly has exposed them. The truth is, we are all prisoners of something—we don’t have much choice about that. But we do have some say in what we will be enslaved to.
I came across this verse recently, and it struck me in a new way in this season of fear and quarantine:
Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.
Zechariah 9:12
Prisoners of hope. What would it look like, I wonder, to be a prisoner of hope rather than a prisoner of fear?
I want to be chained to hope. I want to shackle myself to it and not let go. I want it to follow me wherever I go.
The fact that hope takes prisoners implies a battle. There’s nothing passive about it. It requires courage. It’s a fight.
Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.
Mary Oliver
Hope means choosing love, over and over again . . . and asking for forgiveness when we fail. It means doing the next right thing. It means getting up again. It means believing there will be manna enough for today. It means laying down our weapons, and sometimes our screens. It means writing a note, making a phone call, baking a batch of cookies, playing another round of Scrabble. It means listening for the birds and watching for the green daffodil shoots peeking out of the ground.
It means we keep living, one moment at a time. The battle has already been won.
Hope and despair stand always side by side, each determined to outlast the other. If we choose hope, we must join the standoff, with hearts and hands wide open, fighting the urge to fade into despair.
Sometimes
people assume that faith is a crutch, a sign of weakness. ButI would venture to say
that believing in something you can’t see is actually an act of strength, courage,
heroism even. Cynicism comes cheap and easy. It doesn’t require vulnerability.
It doesn’t leave your heart tender and exposed. Cynicism is the easy road.
But faith?
That’s another matter altogether.
When I was waiting and hoping for God to bring a baby into our family three years ago, I chose believe as my word for the year. A friend gave me a bracelet with the word etched into it, and I wore it all year. I’m not sure I ever arrived at whole-hearted belief, but wearing it felt like a promise, a down payment, something I was trying to live my way into.
After Graham
was born, I passed the bracelet along to a friend who was trying to cling to
belief herself. She wore it too, and God did a miracle in her life—both the
internal kind and the big-answer-to-prayer kind. Then one day recently as we
were praying together, she said, “I think it’s time for you to have this back.”
I blinked away
tears as I fastened the familiar clasp. I’d been trying to believe again—for
another miracle, another baby. But my belief felt fragile at best, and at
times, nonexistent. It seemed too
dangerous to put my heart out there to be hurt again. What if God said no?
Could our relationship sustain that kind of disappointment? Wouldn’t it be
safer not to hope, not to ask?
I found myself choking on the prayers, swallowing the words before they could make their way out. But every morning I fastened the bracelet, and that act itself felt like prayer.
Until one day
when I was washing my hands, and without warning, the bracelet broke,
clattering onto the cold tile floor. I’m sure there’s a rational, scientific
explanation for what happened. But heaven help me, I’m a former English major,
so instead my mind swirled with literary terms. Surely this was symbolism. Or
foreshadowing. Or metaphor.
My belief is too flimsy.
My belief is broken.
My belief is damaged beyond repair.
But as I read
the Christmas story through the lens of someone who is trying to believe, I
find I’m in good company.
Zechariah said, “How can I be sure?” Mary said, “How can this be?” Joseph decided to divorce her quietly. The shepherds were terrified.
It appears that God doesn’t choose
those with the most rock-solid faith. He doesn’t pick the ones who are sturdy,
immovable, fearless.
He chooses
ordinary people—ordinary people who serve an extraordinary God. Because our
faith doesn’t depend on how hard we hope or how firmly we believe; our faith is
built on the One we believe in, the object of our belief. The ground doesn’t become less solid if we doubt it will hold us.
And so as we
find ourselves in the season of miracles, the season of the impossible, I want
to choose the vulnerable road of belief. Will you join me?
A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.
Henri Nouwen
If there’s something you are daring to entrust to God in the year ahead, please let me know—I would be honored to believe on your behalf.
***
Postscript: Between the writing and posting of this blog, my servant-hearted husband fixed my bracelet. I have a hunch there’s a metaphor somewhere in there too . . . something about how belief is not a solo activity but a communal venture. Thank you, Daniel, and thanks to all the people who believe alongside us.
As I think back on this year, it seems like joy and grief have been holding hands.
On the one hand, I’ve received far more grace and love than I deserve, not to mention my share of sticky kisses and toddler snuggles.
On the other hand, there has been altogether too much death for one year. The deaths weren’t entirely a surprise, and I know many people have experienced much greater loss. But by my reckoning, any number of deaths feels like one too many.
This year we lost our little Mo, the baby we never got to meet. We lost my funny, kind, smart grandpa—the one we’d lost for the first time over a decade ago to dementia. And last week we lost my beloved friend and mentor, Ruth.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes it helps if I can put a label on what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s an illusion, but I feel like I can start to untangle an emotion when I can call it by name.
Bereft. I looked it up, and it sounds about right to describe the hollow place that has carved itself out just below my esophagus. “Bereft (adjective): lacking something needed, wanted, or expected.”
I still needed you, Ruth. I wanted you, Mo. I expected to have you for just a little longer, Grandpa. And now I find myself lacking.
One of the problems with grief is that you can’t schedule it. It rears its messy head at awkward, inconvenient times, precisely when you don’t expect it or when you’re not wearing waterproof mascara. You go to the funeral, you attend the burial, you walk through the good-bye ceremony, and you think grief will fit in the box you’ve made for it. But it turns out you can’t plan out when you’re going to feel sad. You can’t put it on the calendar and then be done with it.
***
On a brisk November morning, just after Ruth’s funeral, I told Graham, “Okay, let’s put on our coats. We’re going outside to plant hope.” I had work to do and emails to answer and laundry to fold. But those things would have to wait.
So I grabbed a shovel and started chipping away at the stubborn November ground.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked Graham after we’d dug forty holes and unearthed approximately a dozen worms.
“Onion,” he said proudly.
A fair enough guess. The brown bulb looked much more like a shriveled-up onion than a daffodil. I’ve seen plenty of spring blooms in my lifetime, but even I found it hard to believe this little lump would burst out of the ground in golden glory four months from now.
Isn’t that the way hope is? It seems irrational—impossible, even. It doesn’t take root right away. It’s something we plant today with the wild idea that it will bloom after a long winter.
Hope, it turns out, isn’t one of those splashy flowers that gets planted in May and then disappears with the first frost. No, hope is a perennial. You plant it now, when the ground is hard and cold. And you trust that by some miracle, you will reap an eternal spring.
I don’t know what you need hope for today. But I urge you to dig in, even though there are no blooms yet. Dig in, believing that winter won’t last forever. Dig in, and bask in a little bit of tomorrow’s sunshine today.
The snow, like all other deaths, had to melt and run, leaving room for hope.
When you were about the size of a blueberry, newly growing inside me, your dad nicknamed you Mo. He imagined that you’d be spunky, with a sense of humor, maybe even a little mischievous. I don’t question him on these things anymore—somehow he just knows.
We’d been hoping for you and dreaming about you for a while, but we first met you at the doctor’s office. Your tiny heart was beating wildly on the ultrasound screen. For the next three weeks, we walked an inch off the ground, fairly bursting with this secret of new life.
***
The morning of our nine-week ultrasound, I felt a lump of fear lodge in my throat. We’d gotten difficult news at an ultrasound once before, and it was hard to swallow my anxiety. I tried to be rational, to remind myself that the past does not dictate the future. Besides, hadn’t we learned a thing or two about trusting God the last time around?
And so I followed the doctor’s instructions, drinking copious amounts of water in the space of an hour to ensure that my bladder would be sufficiently full for the procedure.
“I’ll show you the screen once I start the next test,” the technician promised me.
She didn’t show me the screen.
Two hours later, the doctor called to confirm what I already knew.
“Your baby stopped growing,” she said. “There is no heartbeat.”
***
Your big brother was taking a nap when I got the call. At just a year and a half old, he doesn’t yet appreciate the concept of a little sibling. But he does know about you. On principle, if not practicality, we made sure he was the first to find out we were expecting. For the past several days, he’s been showing off his newfound ability to say your name.
As I lifted him out of his crib, he rewarded me with his trademark cheeky grin. Then he promptly pointed to my belly. “Mo!” he exclaimed.
I put one hand on his head and the other on you, tiny as you are. And in that brief moment I was given to hold you both, I baptized the two of you in the saltwater fountain of my tears.
***
Baby of mine, I don’t weep for you. You are in a place with no tears and no pain and no loss and no death. Best of all, you are with Jesus. I weep for us, because there are so many things we’ll miss. We’ll miss seeing your smile light up a room. We’ll miss hearing your contagious giggle. We’ll miss finding out your favorite color or if you like cherries or if you have an affinity for knock-knock jokes. We’ll miss holding you in our arms and smelling the top of your baby-fresh head.
Your dad says he pictures God’s love like a nest. It’s hard for me to imagine what heaven is like, but I suppose that’s as good a picture as any. Heaven must be the ultimate nest—where we’re covered, protected, hemmed in by Love himself.
I wish you could have stayed in our nest a little longer. There is a Mo-shaped spot we saved just for you.
But maybe I have this backwards. Maybe you are the one who has arrived in the nest already. Maybe you’re the one who’s saving a spot just for us.
Love, Mom
He will cover you with his feathers. He will shelter you with his wings. His faithful promises are your armor and protection.
One year ago on Christmas Eve, I was holding my three-year-old niece in church as we sang “Silent Night.” My heart was as frozen as the sheet of ice outside. I was feeling much more “bleak midwinter” than “all is calm, all is bright.”
The candles were lit, and the magic was all around me. But no magic was making its way past my Gore-Tex heart.
Round yon virgin,
Mother and Child
Would I ever get to be a mom? I wondered. Another year had passed with no answer, no miracle. And I felt weary. Believing was too hard, too painful. Maybe it was time to concede graciously, to admit that this just wasn’t part of the plan. Maybe it was time to pick up the shreds of hope littered across the floor of my heart and move on.
That’s when my niece looked up and started staring at something near the front of the church. “What is it?” I asked. But she just kept staring, mute. Finally the spell was broken. “I saw an angel,” she told me matter-of-factly.
After the service was over, I did a full interrogation of my niece. Surely this was a misunderstanding or the product of an overactive imagination. But she wouldn’t budge from her claim. And in the quiet of my heart, I sensed God whispering, Do you believe I can still do the impossible? Do you think I’ve retired from performing miracles? You have plenty of head knowledge about me, but do you really believe? Do you believe I can work in your own life, right now, this year?
In that moment, I didn’t know. I wanted to believe, but I wasn’t sure I did.
So I did the best I could: I told God I would try. I decided my word for 2017 would be believe—not because I did, but because I wanted to learn. I hoped he could thaw my icy heart.
***
One year later, we were singing “Silent Night” again. Only this time I didn’t light my candle, because my arms were full. I was holding a baby in my arms—my own sleeping son.
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace
As I tried to wipe away the tears before they splashed onto my baby, I saw clearly that belief isn’t something you earn. It isn’t something you can take credit for. It’s a gift, pure and simple. It’s a piece of grace given to the likes of someone like me who doesn’t deserve it.
2017 didn’t have to end the way it did. I know full well that some people believe with more fervor and faithfulness than I could muster and don’t get the answer they long for. I don’t know why. But I do know that belief is worth it. Because even if we don’t get the thing we want, belief moves us. It changes us. It softens us. It thaws us.
No matter how things turn out, belief draws us close to the heart of the God who loves us.
This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child.
~Madeleine L’Engle
Whatever you are believing God for in 2018 (or trying to believe), may God give you the courage to hope again. And when you can’t hope, may you feel the warmth of his arms around you.
One year ago on Christmas Eve, I was holding my three-year-old niece in church as we sang “Silent Night.” My heart was as frozen as the sheet of ice outside. I was feeling much more “bleak midwinter” than “all is calm, all is bright.”