9 years ago, intense grief transformed how I think about Christmas…and God, the incarnation, being fully human, and suffering.

I treasure experiencing God the way I did when I was plunged into the turbulent waters of grief.

But what does the ‘real Christmas Jesus’ mean for us if we’re not the ones choking and grasping for air?

What if we’re not experiencing the acute grief of bereavement and loss, but the chronic grief of living and loving in a broken world? Our parents are hurting, our kids are hurting, our friends are struggling, and we feel burdened by all the pain in and around us?

Our to-do lists and schedules are oppressive, our sleep is interrupted, our bodies aren’t cooperating with us, and our souls? When we stop to notice, they surprise us with an ache and depth of longing we’re not sure we have time or energy for.

Jesus is with us here, too.

The beauty of God-With-Us is that Jesus lived with decades of the all same types of stressors as us. Relational, physical, emotional, political, spiritual, environmental. He saw—more fully than us—the ways our experience on earth falls short of His Father’s Kingdom. And unlike ‘felt-board’ Jesus, He didn’t let the coming glory allow Him to float through our world, spiritually bypassing all of the pain. He entered in. He sat in it. He got His hands dirty, He pushed His body to its limits, He grieved, He got angry, He felt lonely, He saw suffering and pain He knew wouldn’t be solved in His lifetime.

He sees me, with my painfully small ‘window of tolerance’ that makes the daily challenges of raising sensitive and intense kids feel impossible at times. He sees us and our loved ones and friends who are facing bereavement, life-threatening and intractable diagnoses, mental health battles, financial burdens, broken relationships, broken hearts.

And when we lift our eyes to Jesus, in the acute or the chronic, He is still “bent down, bent low with you, great shining tears matching, exceeding yours, responding with tenderness and empathy.“

May we take moments this Christmas to enter into our own pain and longing, and lift our tear-filled eyes¹, and experience Jesus, Emmanuel in fresh and healing ways.

Merry Christmas fellow mourners, fellow humans.

1. I love this quote from Susannah Spurgeon, “Tears may, and must come; but if they gatherin the eyes that are constantly looking up to You and heaven, they will glisten with the brightness of the coming glory.” ↩︎