Holiday Tears
Christmas time is one that is often joyful. Cozy. Filled with family, laughter, and comforts. For some, though, the holidays are quite painful. Joy mixed in with sadness and pain. The holidays have a way of aggravating the wound from suffering. It’s a time where life slows down enough for us to feel the pains we so easily medicate in our western busyness. Where do we go for hope when the holiday tears fall? When you are reminded of your son that died at birth? When the sofa is a little less full this Christmas because Grandpa passed away? When you’re away in a new place, alone, while everyone around you seems happy and festive? If you live long enough, holiday tears will fall. Ones of sadness mixed with festive joy.
It reminds me of the imagery of a shadow. A shadow is defined as “The dark figure cast upon a surface by a body intercepting the rays from a source of light.” The holidays have a way of casting a light of joy, of hope. A remembrance of God and Jesus and of family. And suffering is the ‘intercepting body’ that blocks a bit of that light, casting a shadow upon those who have suffered loss and pain.
There are two specific questions I want to answer in this article:
How are we to think through the mixture of positive and negative emotions as Christians? (Framework)
What hope do we have when we are currently in one of those shadows experiencing holiday tears? (Application)
Are “negative” emotions bad
Beep. Beep. Beep.
With my eyes still closed, I instinctively reach over and silence my pager. Pulling it up to my face it reads “MICU 12 - Code Blue” in its familiar black letters on a fluorescent green background. The clock reads 3:23 AM. I grab my badge and walk out the door of my on-call room. One short walk and an elevator ride takes me to MICU, one of many ICU’s in the hospital I worked at as a chaplain. As I walked onto the floor a nurse grabbed my arm and pulled me aside gently. Seeing tears in her eyes, she briefs me on the situation I am about to walk into. A young man’s heart suddenly stopped. It doesn’t look good she tells me.
Their son ended up dying that night. They were devastated. After spending a few hours together, grieving, I walked them to their car in our parking garage and watched them drive off. The car that had 3 people when it arrived 24 hours ago, only had 2 as it left.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
My pager reads: “Family consult - NICU Pod 3” - It’s 7:30 A.M. now.
After a long walk and a few elevator rides, I arrive at our NICU. Preparing for the worst I walk in. It turns out the family just wanted to say goodbye. Their little one was being discharged and they were heading home, together, as a family. During out time together I had given them the space to ask hard spiritual questions, to grieve and cry, and also to laugh some. My heart was full as I walked mom, dad, and now baby, to their car in our parking garage and watched them drive off. The car that had 2 people when it arrived 4 weeks ago, had 3 as it left.
I went back to my office and grappled with the shift I had just experienced. It was a type of emotional whiplash, feeling such sad lows and moments later, feeling such happy highs. I always struggled with this dissonance of opposite emotions at the hospital. A car driving away with a smaller family and a car driving away with a bigger family. These types of experiences would always mix together and create this strange concoction of opposite feelings. Pastors, counselors, and medical staff know this strange sensation. At first I thought I needed to stuff the sadness away and feel the joy to be healthy. But that did not work. The truest way back to emotional equilibrium, was to feel both. To not hide from either one. And to also not hide them from the Lord.
Don’t Bury Your Negative Emotions
As western Christians, we are awful at understanding negative emotions. We think the quickest way back to “positive emotions” or happiness is what is best. The quickest way to deal with negative emotions, though, is one of suppression, not processing. We must realize, when we suppress negative emotions, we rob ourselves of knowing and feeling the comfort God delights to give to his hurting children. We see this in Psalm 34:18: “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
God cares about your specific sorrows this Christmas. What you are going through it not outside of His awareness’s. When holiday tears fall this season let them fall knowing that the Father’s arms are open. He will meet you where you are. He wants us to process our sorrows with Him. There is no need for pretense with God, be where you are. We cannot do that if we buy into our commercialized western understanding of holidays that to feel anything but positive emotions is unfaithful and un-holiday. Do you want scriptural evidence that the first Christmas was a mixture of happiness and sadness? This verse follows the “safe”, “cozy”, story of Jesus’ birth.
Matthew 2: 16-17
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.
We always skip over that part of the Christmas story. Understandably. But I believe it offers us a helpful framework to understand the emotional dissonance that can happen with holidays. Jesus. Light coming into the world. Herod killing the boys because of Jesus birth. Darkness. Shadows. Dissonance.
We’ve looked at how we as Christians are to think about the mixture of positive and negative emotions during the holidays. We’ve seen that the first Christmas was in fact a mixture of these positive and negative emotions, casting a shadow on God’s people. When we find ourselves in the shadow, we must turn to God. We must be honest and feel what we feel. Only then can we process it with God, allowing our hearts to be vulnerable and known by God.
Knowing how to think about our negative emotions is helpful and comforting, but what hope do we have?
Hope in the shadows
When we decides to enter into the darkness of grief, we may question where God is. A loving God is not always seeable in the midst of tragedy that seems anything but good. We may say with C.S. Lewis,
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him...if you remember yourself and turn to Him… you will be - or so it feels- welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
C S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1989), 17.
Amidst the darkness, God may seem far away. I can’t help but feel that is how God’s people felt when Herod was killing all the male children. “Where is God!” They must have asked, or screamed. Where was He? Amongst them in a manger.
The Beauty Of The Incarnation
Jesus came into this earth and was born. He felt emotions, pain, and sorrow. We see this in the story of Lazarus, when Jesus weeps. Jesus knows he is going to go raise Lazarus from the dead, so why does he weep? Is it not that he is entering into the emotions and grief of those around him? He was deeply moved by what they were experiencing and going through! The incarnation was not just a doctrinal statement, but proof of the reality of God’s love. God willingly subjected himself to the pain created because of the fall of this world, so that we would not have to go through it alone. Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, said in his book Night, “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know. But will they at least understand?”
Those of us who did not experience Auschwitz will never know the pain of it. Because we weren’t there. We couldn’t smell the smells or see the pain firsthand. But in Jesus, not only has He sought to understand! But by stepping into our own sufferings via the incarnation he is knowing. Hebrews 4 says:
We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Jesus took on flesh so he could know! Because Jesus has personally gone through pain, sorrow, and grief. When we go to him in our own, he knows what we feel. He can sympathize and understand because of the incarnation. As Sittser says:
The sovereign God came in Jesus Christ to suffer with us and to suffer for us. He descended deeper into the pit than we will ever know. His sovereignty did not protect him from loss. If anything, it led him to suffer loss for our sake. God is therefore not simply some distant being who controls the world by a mysterious power. God came all the way to us and lived among us… The God I know has experienced pain and therefore understands my pain. In Jesus I have felt God’s tears, trembled before his death on the cross, and witnessed the redemptive power of his suffering. The Incarnation means that God cares so much that he chose to become human and suffer loss, though he never had to.
Gerald Lawson Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss, expanded ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, ©2004), 157-158.
In a very personal way, God has chosen to feel all that we would feel on this earth in Jesus. What amazing love. The desire to not only understand what we go through, but willingly experience it himself so as to help comfort us. What love Jesus shows us. In God we truly have a comforter for every wound.
What is the ending point of grief?
While on this earth, we never truly get over grief. But, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we see the end. Sittser’s words help conclude our study:
Those who were given sight [by Jesus] went blind again, those who were made to walk went lame again, and those who were given life died again. Suffering and death won out in the end. In other words, Jesus' miracles were not the ultimate reason for his coming. His great victory was not his miracles but his resurrection. Jesus conquered death and was raised by God to a life that would never die again. The Easter story tells us that the last chapter of the human story is not death but life. Jesus' resurrection guarantees it. All tears and pain and sorrow will be swallowed up in everlasting life and pure, inextinguishable joy.
Gerald Lawson Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss, expanded ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, ©2004), 167.
In the death of Jesus Christ, hope seemed to be lost to darkness. Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead. The resurrection proved that Jesus defeated death. Death and suffering will not have the last stroke of the story. The sun has set on this earth. Darkness surrounds us. We are in the shadows. We catch glimpses of light around the corners from time to time. But, one day, because of Jesus, the sun will rise again, and we will see the threads of our loss and pain, woven into a beautiful tapestry of God’s glory.
Your pain this holiday is not unseen by the Lord. Feel what you must feel. Cry the holiday tears. Grab hold of the promises we’ve outlined above. Jesus felt all of our pains Himself so that we would not be alone. And that in His resurrection, all suffering and death were defeated. For now, we have his promises to comfort us in the shadows. But soon, we will hear with our own ears and feel on our own faces, the gentle hands of God, wiping away our tears—and the intercepting body of suffering being rolled away, like the stone from the tomb, allowing the light to finally shine uninterrupted and together we will hear,
A loud voice from the throne saying: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.” And the One seated on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Revelation 21:3-5
One day.
Merry Christmas friends,
Josh.