Avoidance. Escape. Distraction. These have been our coping strategies for managing the Christmas season since losing Tyler. Ron and I have wondered if perhaps it would have been a blessing in disguise to have had other children still living at home to force us to maintain our Christmas traditions. This was our second Christmas of deliberately avoiding all our typical observations of the Season. We decided it would be our last.
Next year we will decorate our home, follow the Advent calendar, attend Christmas Eve services, and host our family again. On some levels the escape has been good; on other levels it only makes it more obvious that something huge is missing from our lives.
The truth is, you cannot escape Christmas. As much as I tried to mentally brace for it, still I struggled as the season progressed. I was unprepared for my reaction the first time Hark the Herald Angels Sing played. Sudden tears erupted as I recalled helping little Tyler memorize a line of that song for his part in a Christmas pageant. I was equally unprepared when I listened to my pastor eloquently read Luke’s Christmas story during a church service. I couldn’t stop my mind from replaying each of Tyler’s renditions of that same passage on Christmas mornings before opening gifts, nor could I stop my heart from breaking over the fact I’d never hear him read it again.
Even receiving Christmas cards was difficult as I placed each one in a stack rather than up on our foyer wall as part of our annual Christmas card tree… the blank wall just another stark parallel to the void in our world. As for not decorating… Tyler was our decorating elf. He loved it. We played Christmas music as we transformed our home into a Christmas wonderland. The first decoration to be hung each year was a rather childish advent calendar with stuffed Velcro figures to stick to a fabric manger scene. His last Christmas with us, our 15-year-old-man-size boy, with feigned teenage indifference, made updating that calendar the first thing he did every morning. How could we face decorating without him?
While Ron’s and my ideas for coping during Christmas may have been a bit dysfunctional and not very successful, there was one significant benefit. Making traditions come to life can lead into the trappings that so overwhelm and exhaust us, causing us to lose sight of what Christmas is. With none of our energy focused on the “hustle and bustle,” Ron and I were able to be awed anew by God’s amazing Gift to humanity. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son….”
I woke up early Christmas morning in a hotel bed (a last minute tactic to avoid waking up in our Tyler-less, undecorated home) and lay in bed, thinking. I thought about God’s astounding plan to offer salvation to our lost and hurting world. The Son left the glory of Heaven to emerge on earth into absolute squalor as the helpless baby of first-time teenage parents. He left the glory of Heaven, where he reigned as God and Creator of the universe, to live within the limitations of a tiny human body. He chose to begin as a newborn and experience teething, hunger, filth, childhood illness, half-siblings, poverty, adolescence.
As he grew, he experienced the same temptation to sin that we experience. He felt it just as strongly because he was fully human, yet avoided giving in to it because he was fully God. And as a young adult, he chose to abandon the relative comfort of his family’s village, his family home and his family business to begin his path to rejection, persecution, torture and death by starting to reveal his purpose and his true identity.
Over the next few years, he withstood both followers and enemies alike who misconstrued his teaching. But his death, when God in human form was unthinkably nailed to a tree, resulted in salvation as he conquered the grave and returned to his glorious Heaven. Finally, the chasm between a perfect, holy God and sinful humankind was bridged once and for all. The need for animal sacrifices, grain sacrifices, sacrificial following of religious Law – all were eliminated by the perfect Sacrifice that began with the arrival of a baby whose cries echoed in a cave intended for livestock.
“For God so loved the world that he gave…” All we have to do is receive, and we will no longer live our lives separated from God. Neither our lives here on this earth nor our eternity.
Every time I wonder at this Gift of salvation which permeates the reason behind Christmas, I now think about my own “one and only son.” Tyler learned about this Gift as he grew. He learned about it at church, at school, and at home. As a boy of about 8 or 9, he finally understood that like any other gift, simply seeing it and believing it exists isn’t enough. It’s not yours to enjoy until you receive it for yourself. Tyler chose to unwrap his Gift of salvation. The rest of what would be his short life on earth was lived not separated from God, but in relationship with God. And post-death, Tyler’s eternity is lived not separated from God, but with God face-to-face.
For me, I expect that Christmas will always be intensely painful because I am a mother who has lost her child. It will be painful whether I embrace old traditions, create new ones, or avoid them all. But in the midst of my pain, I will rejoice. Because the Christmas Gift my son received as his own is an eternal one.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” John 3:16-17