Category Archives: grief

if it doesn’t feel like Christmas

Posted on by December 17, 2024

There’s something I want to tell you that I think some of us need to hear right now. 

One night, years ago, one of our kids said, “It doesn’t feel like Christmas.” I think she meant it in passing, but it became a tearful lament as she talked about how we had done all the festive things – the lights were lit, the tree was up, the Christmas music was playing, we had gathered with friends and feasted together – but it still didn’t feel like Christmas. 

if it doesn't feel like Christmas -- Shannon Guerra

She couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe it was because we were moving, maybe it was because Vince and I had both been sick recently, but the feeling of Christmas was missing for her. 

Maybe you are also sick. Maybe you are grieving. Maybe you are dealing with conflict, or loss, or transition, or some other hard issue, and it doesn’t feel like Christmas. 

Here’s what I want you to hear. It’s what I told her, it’s what I’ve told myself, and it’s what He told me as we began a very hard season several years ago: 

Our feelings do not define reality. 

Our feelings, especially when they seem contrary to the reality around us and the truth we know, are often the result of attacks from the enemy who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. 

Our feelings are the results of our thoughts, and sometimes our thoughts are not our thoughts at all. Sometimes they are attacks planted by someone who wants to strip your season of joy and strip your identity of truth. 

We go through hard things; that is reality. But those things do not define us. Grief does not defeat us, uncertainty does not derail us, and bodily weakness does not make us a failure. 

if it doesn't feel like Christmas -- Shannon Guerra

Christmas was never meant to be polished and perfect. Christmas was meant to point us to the Savior who said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth.” He is the Savior who meets us in the middle of our mess. He was born for this. 

So Christmas doesn’t have to feel the same way every year to still be Christmas.

Many people are doing different things and are in different situations this year. It feels new and uncomfortable. A little awkward. Maybe it’s deeply painful.

If that’s you, you’re not doing Christmas “wrong.”

Pull back a little, if you can. Don’t look too closely at the pain; don’t give the enemy’s work all your attention. God is at work even more, always more, and He is always taking the enemy’s measly attempts and turning them on their head in triumph for your good and for His glory.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

— Romans 8:28

The Lord is moving in this season and all its weirdness. Watch closely for that; you don’t want to miss it.

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

— Isaiah 43:19

Here’s the thing I have to remember in this season, and maybe it’ll help you, too: Jesus was born in a manger to show us that life will be messy. It doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong when the unpredictable happens. It means we’re human and authentic and always needing Him.

Our need is where He meets us. The sooner we recognize it, the sooner we recognize He’s already here with us.

We think that it would be a perfect Christmas, if only. If only everyone was healthy. If only that person weren’t in the hospital. If only the prodigal would come home. If only that relationship or injury were healed. If only that special need wasn’t so, you know, special.

Here’s what I’m learning and reminding myself, and telling you too, if you need it: Jesus’ birth was a damper, too.

If only they hadn’t had to travel at that time. If only the census wasn’t required. If only there was room at the inn. If only they had been a few days earlier. If only they had a real bed to lay down in. If only…all the things.

And here is where we celebrate His birth. In the imperfect. In the serving. In the waiting and postponing and rescheduling. In the running up and down the stairs with treatments and herbs and broth. In running back and forth from the hospital, or the friends’ house, or the church. In praying for the sick, the wounded, and broken, and in recognizing ourselves among them.

This is where we remember that we need Jesus.

This is why He came.

He knew that the sick and wounded and broken needed a Savior to heal them. He knew we needed help to crush the enemy who harasses us.

And so He came, imperfectly, in terrible circumstances, to be our perfect Savior — the One who took the dirt and the mess and the clawing pain of devastation, and put it all under His feet.

if it doesn't feel like Christmas

He’s the rescuer who wasn’t afraid to get His hands dirty. He’s the one who ran into the burning building, who never gave up searching until we were safe. He’s the warrior who had no mercy on the enemy for our sake, turning the tables and bringing the whip against those who tried to defeat and destroy us. And He’s the healer who put His hand on our foreheads, and released light and truth and wholeness.

That’s the King we celebrate and emulate on Christmas and every day. He’s the one who became like us to save us, and to show us who we’re really meant to be: The ones who reflect Him, shattering darkness and scattering light in every situation, just like He showed us.

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find the gold: God’s not wasting any time

Posted on by November 7, 2023

No one can waste time like a writer. Not only are we spectacular at procrastinating, but the technology is irrational, the process is laborious, and you’ll never even see most of the words we write. Typetypetype, highlight, delete – poof, they’re gone, outta here, no bueno, tossed in the bin, gone forever. Another day at the desk, and only a fraction of the words written are kept to be shared…eventually.

And then – humor me for just a minute, you’ll appreciate this – there are the days you encounter technical difficulty that defy logic and the most elementary commands of a computer. You tell the document to print, and the printer says there’s a jam even though you can’t find any paper in the track. So you empty the entire contents of the printer and restart; try again, but it’s still jammed; dislodge the mechanical guts of the machine and finally find a microscopic piece of confetti; put everything back together and ask it to print again.

Suddenly the stupid thing releases twelve emails from last year, the entire 911 commission report, the Mayflower Compact, the Magna Carta, and the ancient code of Hammurabi.

And then it says you’re out of ink.

BLANKETY BLANK.

find the gold: God's not wasting any time

Last year when we were releasing the ABIDE series we spent four days trying to upload a proof, and then two more days waiting for the proof to come back, only to realize the file had formatting errors that had to be fixed before going to print. It was a rookie mistake and I knew better. Every time we saved the files, small elements would move and it didn’t matter what browser I used, how we saved it, whether I retyped things or just re-pasted them correctly, they kept shifting out of place (just like this meme).

Many emails to the website’s support crew later, Vin finally fixed it all in Photoshop. And the delay didn’t make sense for any reason other than possibly, just maybe, that support team at the website needed to learn about Jesus and prayer, because they got to read pages 44 through 56 of ABIDE volume 4 in advance. Either that, or they desperately needed the recipe for Farmbake.

So much wasted time. But just as often, it’s my own fault.

For example, the file I’m working on lately says “round 4” but that’s a lie because I’ve tackled this book at least twice that many times. But this is probably the fourth time I’ve completely rewritten it, trashing so many paragraphs and pages that were less than what I want it to be. I’m back to those beginning chapters again and honestly, I’m nervous about getting further into it because I know where the story is going, even though I still don’t know how it ends.

I know pain is coming. So I stall and do other work, saving just thirty minutes of the day to tackle this one. Thirty minutes at a time will not finish a book by February – or even May, probably – but some days it’s all I think I can handle.

Which doesn’t mean it really is all I can handle. It’s just that that’s how much obedience I’ve been willing to put into it. So the delay is all on me, and the reward will come as soon as I surrender into really doing the work.

Part of the problem is that it’s a memoir so almost everything is in past tense, but I’m still learning to recognize what happened. And the problem with that is that I am telling, not showing, which is a huge no-no in writerly endeavors. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. It’s not that boring, trust me, but still, it’s telling and not showing. As Annie Dillard says, “You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arm, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.’”

But this is a story that must be told, not shown, and I’m walking the line carefully to protect our kids and ourselves and others who, alas, would not be flattered if I shared in full what really happened. Because also, as Annie Dillard said:

Everybody I’m writing about is alive and well, in full possession of his faculties, and possibly willing to sue. Things were simpler when I wrote about muskrats.

– from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

Maybe that’s why I write so much about poultry lately.

So I grab a stack of books off the shelf, all highly recommended by someone or other as excellent specimens of memoirs, which are notoriously hard to write well.

I open one: Memoirs by Pablo Neruda. This is at the top of many lists. I thumb through, and…telling, not showing. Not all, surely, but a lot of it. Past tense, this happened, then this, and then this. But not like a drunk; it’s interesting.

I thumb through A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin, and The Road to Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. Same. Past tense. Lots of telling. But it’s not bad; it’s good writing. I grab a few more books off the shelf, skim through from back to front, read snatches of sentences here and there.

When Vin brings up afternoon coffee I’m hunched over my shelf looking for Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and cannot find it anywhere. It’s red, I’m sure, but I scan all the red books to no avail, check all the others in case I’m misremembering, and finally find it with a pink spine that used to be red but faded in the sunlight back when my shelf was on the other wall. I crack it open and there’s this: I was ten when I met the dancing school boys… and she’s telling but she’s also right there with me over coffee, and we’re looking back together. And that’s both an answer and confirmation because that’s how I tend to write anyway when I’m doing my best work.

But before I get there, I still have to choose to do the work, any work, and risk it not being the best work because it can’t all be the best. Not all the words that get typed are words that get published. Vin and I have started calling these the invisible words, the ones that didn’t ring as true as the words that came later. Because it takes a lot of words to sort through before the right ones come that are worth sharing with everyone else. It takes a lot of digging and sifting to find the gold.

And that is life: We are learning to live our story in the best way to find the gold. We risk the days knowing that there will be plenty of them that feel wasted, that we don’t want to share or relive. Some of our days are filled with grit and regret, fingers in the dirt full of pain and confusion, betrayal and trauma. Those are the ones that bring us to a crossroads of choosing to get bitter or get better, to lose our faith or to find it. One choice leads us to the gold, and the other makes us the drunk hanging on someone’s arm, spewing things that should’ve been deleted.

The good news is that we can surrender anytime. It’s never too late to let go, and do some deleting. The Lord knows what to do with our surrender. He’s not wasting any of it; every piece of grit refines us into someone who reflects Him more.

Some people come through awful childhoods and become productive, contributing adults, while others do antisocial and even monstrous things. Why?

It is similar to one brother asking another, “Why did you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is, “Because Dad was a drunk.” The second brother then asks, “Why didn’t you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.”

– Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear

The wasted days and regrettable experiences are making us into who we are, just as the invisible words are getting us to the ones that tell the story the way it needs to be told. Deciding whether to surrender them or cling to them is what makes the difference.

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

Posted on by September 14, 2022

I never rearrange furniture, but here we were doing it, moving shelves and purging drawers and hauling a chest up two flights of stairs.

Somewhere in the process of measuring to see if everything fit, I lost the tape measure. It wasn’t clipped to my pants, wasn’t on one of the shelves, wasn’t anywhere on the floor amid the piles of stuff everywhere. So I hollered upstairs to Finn.

“Did I leave the tape measure up there? On the counter? Maybe on the kitchen island?” I heard him rummaging while I sorted stacks of unused picture frames.

“Found it! It was in the drawer!” he yelled back down.

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

I walked back to the stairway thinking, In the drawer? I didn’t put it in the drawer… and as I came to the foot of the stairs, he approached the top of the stairs at the same time – and an image flashed through my mind of him throwing the heavy tape measure at me down the stairs. Because he’s six, and he might do something like that without thinking.

And then he did it.

His arm moved and the tape measure hurtled down the stairs at me, and I screamed.

And then I stopped screaming as it unrolled and flitted to my feet, harmless.

Here’s what happened: I was expecting the same tape measure I had lost – you know, the heavy, metal, retractable kind – but Finn had found the tape measure I use for knitting, which is just a long, plastic ribbon 60 inches long. And that’s what he threw at me.

Life has been throwing a lot at all of us lately, hasn’t it? We often don’t realize how on edge we are, just waiting for the next blow.

A couple weeks ago we finally had Reagan’s assessment. After it was done, I sat in an office with the psychologist (not the first one we miserably encountered; this one was terrific) and we debriefed on what had just happened.

We had sat through three hours of questions and exercises and tests, and Reagan had not even spelled her first name correctly. She answered the simplest of math questions wrong. When the doctor asked her how old she was, she said, “I twenty-seven,” and told him her birthday was in September. But she’s sixteen, and it’s not.

I was devastated. Ten years of parenting, homeschooling, trial and error, endless repetition, and this is what we had to show for it. All I could think was, What must this man think of our efforts as parents? It was Reagan’s assessment, but I felt like I had failed the test.

The doctor and I went over the results, her responses, her IQ, her behavior at home, the anxiety of testing, and the complications with all of her special needs. The whole time, I was bracing myself for judgment, condemnation, the pitying shake of the head, the professional condescension.

But none of that happened.

Instead, he said this:

“You and your husband have done an outstanding job with Reagan.” He paused. “The fact that she can read at all is remarkable.”

Aaaand that’s when I broke down sobbing. The weight lifted and relief flooded over me. The psychologist frantically searched for tissues, having no idea what to do with a crying woman across the desk. But he kept talking and he wasn’t just being nice; he went over all the challenges again and juxtaposed our efforts and Reagan’s abilities over them, and the result was stunning. I’m still not over it.

We often try to protect ourselves by expecting the worst. We brace for the blow because we’ve been hurt before, and we’d rather be prepared than be blindsided by calamity that comes out of nowhere.

But what about the good things that come out of nowhere, too? What if instead of the crash you expect, the Lord has prepared a soft landing?

A friend of mine said this a few weeks ago: Have you ever braced for a hard impact only to end up getting a soft nudge that barely upset your balance? It was like that. I saw the redirection coming and I expected it would bring me to my knees, but in minutes, I could already see His plan was better than mine.

I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. We white-knuckle our way through these crazy days, expecting disappointment and catastrophe, resigned to the worst. But this is not the way of the Lord, and this is not what Godly surrender is.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

– Romans 8:18

This brings me to a word I learned recently, so here you go:

Eucatastrophe: the sudden, unexpected, joyous turn of events.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term, but the eucatastrophe is all God’s doing. And this, friends, is where we’re supposed to live. Our fear can give permission to the enemy for what we dread, but our trust and expectation make way for the breakthrough.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”

– Romans 4:20-22

Often, we have perfectly good reasons to brace for impact because we’ve seen how things play out. But we’ll have more peace in the preparation if we recognize that we serve the God of the eucatastrophe – the one who stills the storm, breaks bread for the multitude, and causes recklessly thrown projectiles to flutter harmlessly to our feet.

It is the story of Mephibosheth, the crippled grandson of a previous king who was called into the presence of King David. Mephibosheth had no reason to expect anything but slaughter for himself and his family; it was typical then to completely eliminate the previous regime’s offspring. He knew he’d been living on borrowed time, and it looked like that time was up.

He had no idea that God was already moving on his behalf, that the eucatastrophe was already in motion. He could never have imagined that King David was looking for a remnant in his family line not for the sake of hunting them down, but for the sake of showing kindness to them out of love for his old friend, his best friend…Mephibosheth’s father Jonathan, who died years earlier.

And Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan, son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and paid homage. And David said, “Mephibosheth!” And he answered, “Behold, I am your servant.” And David said to him, “Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always.”

– 2 Samuel 9:6-7

We keep expecting more situations like what we’ve already lost. But loss is not what God gives us when we turn to Him. Our losses are not compounding; they are recompensing.

Be glad, O children of Zion,
    and rejoice in the Lord your God,
for he has given the early rain for your vindication;
    he has poured down for you abundant rain,
    the early and the latter rain, as before.

The threshing floors shall be full of grain;
    the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

I will restore to you the years
    that the swarming locust has eaten.

– Joel 2:23-25a

I had a dream recently that Vince had been emailing back and forth with someone about a history course he offers. The man’s name was Bao Leng, and when he purchased the course, Vin said, “Bao Leng came through!” In my dream, I immediately heard the Lord say, Look up the meaning of that name. So I tried to do it, but as often happens in dreams, things didn’t work – I tried typing letters into my phone but they wouldn’t enter correctly, the search engine was all messed up, and my laptop was just as useless.

But as soon as I woke up, I looked it up. And here’s what I saw:

A breakthrough. Huh. Not like we haven’t been talking about that at all lately.

Okay, so now we have two new words in our vocabulary. Let me give you one more.

Respair: The return of hope after a period of despair.

And this is also where some of us are being called to. We were never meant to walk in fear, talking ourselves out of the big things He’s called us to instead of getting to experience the eucatastrophe of His grace on us.

She had been setting her teeth and clenching her fists for a terrible blast of lion’s breath; but the breath had really been so gentle that she had not even noticed the moment at which she left the earth.

– C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Yes, situations are hard and the world right now is a circus on psychotropic drugs. But no, fear does not get to win the day. Fear doesn’t even get to take a backseat and come along for the ride. Fear needs to be shoved out the door while we’re hauling down the highway.

This is not the season to entertain fear. This is the season for eucatastrophe, for bao leng, for respair.

What if our “what ifs” have been all wrong?

What if some of the struggles we’ve accepted as just part of life were actually just part of a broken mindset? What if some things are meant to be easier, and not harder?

What if the things we’ve struggled over in time-consuming labor came effortlessly in comparison? What if the path was made flat, the boulders moved out of the way, and we could spend more time enjoying the view?

What if the Lord is still turning Sauls into Pauls? Because He is, and each person transformed changes the trajectory of our culture in this era.

What if instead of bracing for impact, we braced for breakthrough?

While we endure, God is working on our behalf in ways we would never imagine. So we trust Him with great expectation. That hope is not wishful thinking; it is the powerful currency that buys us time before the eucatastrophe.