Words for a Grieving Christmas

Devotional

There's an empty chair at the table and no amount of decorating is going to fill it.

The rest of the world moved on into tinsel and lights. Your world has a hole in it, and the holidays only make it easier to see.

Grief doesn't keep a calendar. It doesn't pause for parties. If anything it gets louder while everybody else gets merrier, because the gap between what is and what was becomes unbearable.

Somebody has probably told you it'll get easier. Maybe they handed you a timeline, like grief is a project with a due date.

Or maybe you've told yourself you should be further along. That faith should have carried you past this by now. That a Christian who actually believes in resurrection shouldn't ache this hard in December.

Let Scripture kill that lie before it does any more damage.

The Bible does not hurry grieving people. It sits down with them.

"The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."

Not near to the ones who recovered. Not near to the ones who processed it and arrived at acceptance.

Near to the broken. Near to the crushed.

Nearness to God in Scripture is not a prize for keeping it together. It's a promise made to people who have nothing left to keep together.

And here's something else. The Christmas story is stained with grief.

We remember the angels and the shepherds. The star. The wise men. But Matthew records a scene we'd rather skip past.

After the magi left, Herod's rage came down on Bethlehem's children. And Jeremiah's old words came true all over again:

"A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more."

That's in the Christmas story. Not in the margins. Not in a footnote.

The Savior was born into a world so broken that his arrival got met with worship and with slaughter, in the same chapter.

So if your grief feels out of place at Christmas, understand that grief has been in this story from the beginning.

The manger was never sentimental. It was a rescue mission dropped into hostile territory, and it cost blood before the child could walk.

But here's what makes the incarnation what it is.

The Son of God didn't come around suffering. He came into it.

Isaiah called him "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." That word acquainted is worth sitting on. Not a stranger to it. Not a visitor. Acquainted. He knew it by name.

"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows."

The baby in that manger grew into the man of sorrows. He'd know rejection. Abandonment. Death.

He didn't just observe grief. He picked it up and carried it in his own body and was crushed under the weight of it, so that its weight would never crush you forever.

That's what the name Emmanuel means.

God with us.

Not God above us, managing our pain from somewhere safe. Not God after us, showing up once the worst is over.

God with us. In the middle of it.

John says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

He dwelt here. He didn't pass through on the way to somewhere better. He made his dwelling in this world.

He stayed.

And because he stayed, because he went into grief and death and the grave itself, he can make a promise nobody else can make.

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore."

Every tear. Not some of them.

Including the ones you've cried this year over the person who won't be there. Including the ones you haven't cried yet because you're still too numb.

Now, that day hasn't come. You know it hasn't, because the chair is still empty and the ache is still yours.

But the promise is anchored to something that already happened.

Christ has come. Christ has died. Christ has risen.

Which means grief is a chapter. A brutal one, and maybe a long one.

It isn't the last one.

So don't perform joy this year. Don't hide the grief behind a wreath or hold a smile through dinner for everybody else's comfort.

You're allowed to mourn.

The God who came near in a manger is near to you right now in a broken heart. He isn't standing across the room telling you to be strong.

He's the God who wept at his friend's grave. Who cried out from a cross. He knows what it costs to lose somebody.

So let the incarnation hold what you can't hold this year.

The Word became flesh for grieving people in a grieving world.

He didn't come to explain your pain. He came to carry it, and one day to end it.

Until then, he's near.

That's not everything you want.

But he is enough, and he is here.