Let Your Longings Lead You To Hope

For anyone battling her way through life, the holidays can feel like a mockery. It’s a time for good cheer, gratitude, gatherings, comfort, and joy. It’s the one time of year when we are consistently prompted to lean into our emotions, memories, nostalgia, family experiences, and longings—all those places where woundedness lives. We are constantly pushed into awareness of all the things we’re missing. We are pressured into the frequent company of others, often those with whom we have the most complex and distressed relationships. It’s no wonder many of us find it difficult to push our way through.

We each developed our individual ways of coping. And, almost without acknowledgment, our family set aside many of our established ways, rhythms, habits, and traditions in favor of a severe pragmatism born of necessity.

Mom was ill for years before I was born. Schizophrenia already had a foot in the door when she was nineteen, when she and Dad married. But her intelligence and concealment conspired with the ignorance, fear, and familiarity of those around her, and her illness was overlooked for years. Until the day Mom lost reality itself, and everyone ran out of excuses. In my mind, family history divides by that day—the day before and the day after we fell apart.

Perhaps your story has its own day of demarcation. It’s a day when you lost dreams and your vision of the future. Maybe it was a moment when a ninety-degree turn led you down a path you didn’t know was possible, and now you realize it’s one you may travel for the rest of your life. Maybe it’s a day when caregiving became part of your routine, and you began learning a new lexicon. It’s likely a day when fear, worry, anger, or some other dark emotion found new, comfortable corners in your heart.

And for those whose emotions are ragged or who find it difficult to access hope daily, all the holiday talk of peace, joy, and hope can ring hollow. Yet, for all the clanging tinsel and the clashing holiday lights, there is true hope here: Jesus, whom we celebrate at Christmas, is no longer a baby in a manger, helpless and fragile.

At Christmas, we are especially tempted to see Jesus only as he was at first—helpless, vulnerable, frail with human need. We remember his arriving on the scene to serve and to sacrifice—and we believe that is who we worship today. We sometimes forget the miracle of Christmas was not in birth but in incarnation. It was God adopting flailing human form. The wonder is in the contrast between Jesus’ assumed limitations and his true, measureless majesty.

Knowing Jesus, actually, can completely change the way we think and live. We can live with remarkable faith when we know we serve a God who cannot be conquered. We can be transformed by trust. Awestruck and humbled. Flooded with hope. And we can accept and embrace life’s unsatisfying realities—all when we remember that Jesus will return, not as a helpless baby, but in his full and impenetrable glory. All our longings and hopes will be fulfilled—and more.

Perhaps you’ve packed your longings away like keepsakes of a time before everything changed. God wants to hold them for you, grieving with you over what you’ve lost and building your anticipation for what he has in store. It takes courage to live in awareness of what is and what you long for. Draw that courage from the God of all hope.

Like my family, you might have adopted a firm kind of pragmatism that comes to us in times of emergency. It stays alert, assesses needs, and knows how to get the job done. It keeps us in action long past exhaustion and helps us compartmentalize life. It makes sure that grief and longing don’t intrude on what needs to happen today.

Like many ways to cope, that detached practicality can be both blessing and curse. It can help us function in crisis, but it can also destroy the best parts of us. It can train us to live in personal crisis even when no crisis looms because crisis is all we know how to do anymore. And it can cost us our hope for what is better.

Witness this kind of power in the words of the apostle Paul, who endured excruciating suffering and who wrote in Romans 8:18, “What we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later” (NLT). Whether you feel blessed or not this holiday, as a follower of Christ, you are.