I’m not Scrooge, but…

I don’t know when it started, probably around the same time I was wearing sweatshirts boycotting Abercrombie & Fitch’s porn peddling (though  still before I realized that the sweatshirt I was wearing was probably made by child labor in awful conditions), but somewhere along the line, I became an anti-Christmas season person.  It wasn’t difficult at all… 

The music was easy to get annoyed by (whether it’s the oldies station suddenly playing We Wish You a Merry Christmas over and again, or the “safe for the whole family” stations playing Hark the Herald Angels sing… come to think of it, this was probably around the same time I stopped listening to the radio)…   

The people were easy to get annoyed by (packing my precious city with tourists, filling the aisles of every store, pushing past others to get the last [insert hot item of the year here] on display, breaking into shoving matches over who saw “it” first, grumbling about how their significant others had better pick up the hint about what expensive new toy they want for Christmas, allowing their children to desire greedily and snatch with entitlement)… 

The commercialism-spirit (BUY THIS… NEED THAT… 10 Things He Wants for Christmas… 5 Ways to Choose the Best Gift for Her…  Add These to your Christmas List… from TV to the internet to the billboards to radio spots, Consumerism is at an all-time high during this season)

And this, not to even touch on lying to your kids about Santa.

Slowly, God has been taking this heart that has so easily shut out Christmas, and breathing life back into it.  Redeeming Christmas.  Helping me find Jesus in it, buried as he may be under all the gifts and bows and boxes and decorations and cheesy music and entitled pouts.  Finding him in the acute awareness that this is a season about waiting… about living in the tension that exists when God goes silent for 400 years and then appears to shepherds with a Word of Hope that would change the world.  

Frankly, I’m in a season this year around where I get it.  Where I get the waiting.  My pastor is preaching right now on the birth of hope…   its birth into desolation and brokenness and pain and despair.  

I’m at a stable place in my life… a good place even (though like Auslander in Foreskin’s Lament, there’s a part of me that waits for it all to come crumbling around me… learning to trust the goodness of God is an ever-cumulative lesson)… but I see despair at every corner.  

My friends without jobs… friends with marriages and children, friends who can’t just live with their parents while waiting for a job to happen.  Marriages falling apart at every turn… Young couples who yearn for children but can’t have them…  New business ventures dying and dragging people into debt…  Broken hearts and broken families and broken people…  People with stifling shame and regret, choking them at every turn.   The uncertainty of being forced to trust a party with your future, who has time and time again been proven untrustworthy, but realizing you have no other option.  

The pain we inflict on each other.  

There is all this void… all this darkness… all this silence.  And oh, how we need God.  This season, I’m learning to see this space that exists, waiting for the God of the Universe to breathe life and hope and redemption into it.  This is the cavern of despair into which advent enters with all its brilliance.  

This is me, finding Jesus in spite of Christmas.