Joy Belongs to Us

We were healthy the entire first week of December. Adalyn and I had just recovered from the stomach bug that wiped us out after Thanksgiving, and we made it all the way until the evening of December 7th before Adalyn came down with a fever.

That first week of December, we put up our Christmas decorations. We had a magically calm cookie decorating experience. We lit our first advent candle, the candle of Hope, and I felt hope that our life could actually be manageable. I sorted through the girls clothes, and our jumbled medicine stash, and eliminated unneeded kitchen items. We couldn’t really pack anything yet, but I did what I could to get rid of anything we didn’t really need. Purging brings me inner peace.

A surprisingly peaceful cookie decorating experience

But the feeling of peace did not last for long. The day we lit the second advent candle, the Peace candle, Nadia was already down with a fever. “It shouldn’t be too bad,” I thought. Adalyn only had a few days of cough and congestion, so I expected something similarly mild.

Instead Nadia’s fever continued, and she lay listlessly in our arms, half asleep. On Wednesday, I was worried enough to call the pediatrician. After Nadia submitted to her examination without any resistance, the doctor said she had pneumonia and a double ear infection. Her fever, heart rate, and breathing rate were all high, and her oxygen levels were low. The doctor had us start her on a high dose of antibiotics and keep a close eye on her. “If she gets any worse, she needs to go to the hospital for oxygen.”

Sad, listless baby

It was appropriate that this was the week of Peace, because I felt anything but peace. I was so anxious I couldn’t think straight. I tried to count simple numbers to figure out her breathing rate, but I could not make sense of them. I kept reminding myself to breathe. My head was pounding from headache and fear. Over the course of one hour, I sent 20 emails back and forth with my mom and doctor-sister trying to figure out what to do. I have never been so worried about one of my children before, as I listened to her struggle to breathe, as I watched her oxygenation numbers, as she lay listlessly across my chest.

At the hospital the next morning, the children’s waiting area was overflowing with sick children: babies crying, children coughing, some sounding even worse than Nadia. Dozens of parents and grandparents watched us curiously, ever the spectacle, but we were all in this together, worried and waiting.

The children's injection room at the hospital

We were happy to return home after a few hours, but we almost headed straight back when her oxygen levels dropped dangerously low that afternoon. What relief to see the difference albuterol made! After an exhausting morning, carrying Nadia all around the hospital, the rest of the day and night were still stressful, monitoring her breathing, trying to decide if she needed to go back to the hospital. Late that night her oxygen level dropped disturbingly low, and we were already out the door to the hospital when her breathing improved dramatically.

She finally got an inhaler like her sisters

We lost sleep over worry about her breathing, over waking up frequently to give her medicine during the night, and over the effects of the medicine – Nadia was so hyped up she was running around crazy at midnight. Instead of napping, she has been climbing out of her crib. But finally she was breathing. Her fever dropped, she started eating some, she played and danced and climbed on the washing machine to explore the medicine cabinet and grabbed a cleaver in the kitchen. Back to the normal worries about keeping her alive.

Yesterday we started the week of Joy. I struggle with joy more than the others. I am grateful for the promise of hope, I easily recognize the need for peace in the midst of my panic, but joy feels like a pressure. I should feel joy.

Joy belongs to those other people – the ones with the matching Christmas trees and prettily wrapped presents and smiling children. The ones who like the happy carols instead of the wistful ones, who run around doing fun Christmas activities, who are full of optimism.

Not the ones ready to sweep all the clutter straight into the trash, or the ones who whisper-yell at their children, “Go. To. SLEEP. Don’t you dare wake up your little sister!!” with angry eyes in the dark. Not the ones still scrambling to get presents ordered, or the ones with lights burned out two-thirds of the Christmas tree. Joy doesn’t belong to us.

Last week I thought, “You know, this December has still been better than last year.” Which just goes to shows how terrible the last one was. This time last year, as I sat covered by the blackness of winter and sickness and depression, I wrote about waiting for the light. I certainly wasn't feeling the joy; I was just hoping to survive a few more weeks.

Adalyn Lucia leading our St. Lucia Day procession last week. Lucia means "bringer of light."

And I remembered again: we aren’t the ones who have to make the joy happen. Anymore than we are ones creating peace or hope. A star bore witness to generations of hope finally fulfilled. Peace was not a silent night and an anglo-saxon baby who didn’t cry; He himself is our peace. The angel didn’t say, “Hey shepherds, get your joy on!” No, he came to tell them that joy had already arrived - joy in the most ordinary form of a newborn baby.

Next week is the week of Love. And for you and for me it may be a week of whining and snapping and arguments and comparison and imperfection. We can be pretty bad at loving one another. What relief to realize Christmas is not about our love, it is how great the love the Father has lavished upon us.

Sometimes we feel the joy and warmth and love. Sometimes we wait for it. At Christmastime, as nights reach their longest, the darkness seems to be winning, and some years the darkness steals straight into our hearts. But there is a Light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

We are the ones who wait. Expectantly, imperfectly, empty.

Joy belongs to us.


He did not wait till the world was ready,
til men and nation were at peace.
He came when the Heavens were unsteady
and prisoners cried out for release...

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

~ Madeleine L'Engle, Miracle on 10th Street

Waiting for the Light

This is the season of darkness. We eat breakfast and dinner with a backdrop of blackness. Every day is just a little shorter, as the night attempts to overcome the daylight. Some days when the sun does rise, it seems to make amends as it clears the frozen air with orange and yellow light. Other days the sun stays hidden behind a heavy layer of haze and smog and dull clouds. Our lungs are choked with coal dust. If the sun appears, it looks like the weak faded sun of an old, old world.

As a child at Christmastime, I was only aware of the excitement– the decorations, the cookies, the presents waiting under the tree. But as adults, we bear the weight of awareness. We see the brokenness and pain and conflict of individuals and families and nations that do not pause for the “most wonderful time of the year.” Some years we feel less like calling, “Merry Christmas!” and more like crying, “Come, Lord Jesus, come.”

And so we enter the season of Advent. A season of expectant waiting, one in which we join with the groaning of a creation longing to be restored. Each week the wreath on our table is lit by one more candle. Hope, peace, joy, love. Each week we say a new prayer, something simple and childish and so fitting.

Jesus, you are light even in the darkest places...

Jesus you are peace even when there is hatred...

Jesus, you are joy even in the saddest times...

I didn't know much about Advent as a child, beyond waiting eagerly for my turn to open the little door on the advent calendar. I didn't even realize that Advent was a season, the start of the church calendar. Our solar calendar year starts in a flurry of resolutions and new beginnings, recovering our schedules and diets and budgets after a season of celebration. This year we will get it right! How appropriate that the church calendar year starts in quiet reflection, in waiting. This is something bigger than ourselves.

This year we haven't done many Christmas activities. We put up our decorations and strung all the lights, but we haven't even made a single Christmas cookie. Generally I enjoy baking, but this year cookie making means children fighting over turns and a baby crying at my feet, and that sounds more stressful than fun.

We made a faux gingerbread house (from a cardboard box). The girls enjoyed meticulously covering it with wafers and candy, while Nadia scavenged for candy wrappers on the floor. We planned a student Christmas party which was postponed due to sickness. I have searched Taobao for Christmas presents. We read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

But this year doesn't find us particularly jolly. Last week both Kevin and our teammate lost grandparents, and they mourn far from family and home. Our family has been dealing with colds and throwing up and not sleeping. I feel the weighed down by a hard, tiring year.  Too many hormones, too much screaming, not enough sleep. Nearly every one of the girls' friends here have been sick this past week.  We have friends who have lost family, who are in the hospital, who are worried about children or spouses or parents.

There is no place for weariness or grief in our idea of holly, jolly Christmas. But this is what advent is all about. We don't have to make joy; we just wait for it. We accept this dark night. We hold tenuously to hope, we breathe in peace, we watch for joy, like the dawning of the morning.

Each week we light another candle – three this week, the week of joy. Each week the night comes a little earlier, but our dinner table is a little brighter. In the kitchen window, star lights shine clearly against the darkness.

Emmanuel, God is with us. With us in the grief, the sickness, the darkness. This is Christmas:

Light rising in the darkness,

Hope springing from weary despair –

A world resigned is surprised by joy.

A thrill of hope

The weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Mother Mary

Perhaps it's not surprising that I’ve found myself thinking about Mary in this Advent season of being “great with child.” Some pretty amazing things happened to her - an angel appearance seems pretty spectacular, and it’s not every day a heavenly being says you’ve found favor in the eyes of the Lord.  Still, she had to put up with an awful lot of unpleasantness as well.  As I reflected last year on that “holy, messy night,” I imagine the whole experience looked less like a Christmas card and more like Imogene Herdman crying and crying over the baby Jesus.

While her cousin Elizabeth was celebrating a long-awaited baby and the removal of her reproach, Mary was facing shame, suspicion, and likely shunning. The turned backs of neighbors and friends may have seemed a lot more real than the memory of being highly favored. While she was busy laboring in a stable, the shepherds got the whole hallelujah chorus.

Mary experienced a whole lot of trouble along with the glimpses of glory, but after all she had no ordinary role.

After the shepherds and wisemen faded from sight, off to share their moments of epiphany, Mary was still there. She was the one to hold baby Jesus, to gaze into his face, to touch his pudgy cheek.  She nursed him and held him through sleepless nights. Imagine seeing the first of Jesus’ smiles, hearing his childish whispers of love.

Mary was there for the quiet years of his growth. The rest of us know so little about his childhood, but she was there through each moment of it. She knew his favorite food and favorite friends. She laughed at his silly jokes. She wrapped skinned knees and dried tears. He was hungry and she fed him, thirsty and she gave him something to drink, naked and she clothed him, sick and she cared for him - every single day.

Jesus’ closest followers got three years with him; Mary had thirty-three. There was much she did not yet understand, but by the time he started his ministry, imagine how much she already knew of him! She had known he was special from before he was even conceived.

She was there at his birth, and she was there at his death. She stayed nearby and watched him suffer, because how could she turn away now? Though she was helpless and brokenhearted, she gave him all she could: her presence in a time of abandonment. And even in his anguish, Jesus made sure his mother would be cared for.

I think it’s appropriate that Mary was one of the first to know of his resurrection. And how did she come to find out? She was going to fulfill her last motherly duty - anointing her son’s body with burial spices. She wasn’t expecting a miracle - she was doing what she could to care for her son, just as she always had.

How is it that she got to be a part of so many big moments - his announcement, his birth, his first miracle, his death, his resurrection? Certainly she was special, blessed among women. But I think she witnessed these things because she was there.

She didn’t miss the big moments because she was already there for all the little moments. She was already there washing his clothes and making his food, worrying if he was getting enough rest. She swaddled him at birth, and she prepared to anoint his body at death. She had the opportunity to see Jesus from the first to the last. After all, she was his mother.

O Holy, Noisy, Messy Night

This Christmas season I was prepared.  I had all kinds of Christmas activities planned out to do with the girls and our students.  I had an advent wreath (of sorts) and prayers for each week.  I had materials to make a Jesse tree and our own advent calender with a Christmas activity to do each day (yeah, I had a feeling that was going to be a bad idea before I even started).

Then the first of December arrived and I got sick.  And the girls got sick.  The girls improved, but 3 weeks later I'm still coughing my way through the night and croaking my way through the day.  It could be much worse, but I haven’t had a nasty cold drag out this long since I was pregnant (which I’m not, btw).  We should have read a Bible story and made an ornament each day for the Jesse tree.  It currently has 5 ornaments.  The advent calendar is in slightly better shape only because on day 3 I scraped the whole "do an activity each day," and one day we put up 9 pieces.

This Advent hasn't gone quite how I planned.  I feel exhausted and stressed, kind of like most people probably feel right about now.  Much as I want to slow down and relish the wonder of the season, if we’re honest, this feeling might be closer to how everyone felt at the first Christmas.

That Christmas didn't go how Mary planned either.  It was lonely and confusing and inconvenient, and if you've ever been 9 months pregnant, you know she probably felt like crap. 

I've been thinking a lot about Mary this year.  Much as I love Christmas carols, I can't imagine they do much justice to the real story.  There's all this talk of silent nights and a baby who doesn't cry, but have you ever actually been at a birth?  I think birth is an incredible, wonderful process, but even in the most peaceful birth setting (i.e. not a stable), it's generally noisy.  And messy.  And there were no Christmas carols.

Here is Mary, a young girl, having her first baby.  She is far from home and has spent the last days of her pregnancy traveling on a donkey.  I was too uncomfortable to ride in a car for long by the end of pregnancy - but a donkey!  I don't think it's a giant leap to assume she's sore and tired and perhaps silently cursing the emperor for his stupid decrees.

Mary and Joseph finally arrive in Bethlehem only to be greeted by closed doors.  In a culture that so valued hospitality, it must have seemed like a slap in the face.  Were the people of Bethlehem already maxed-out with census travelers?  Did they somehow get wind of the baby's presumably scandalous conception?  Among all Joseph's relatives in his hometown, there was really no-one willing to take in their own family member?  Did they not want to risk bringing condemnation upon themselves, accepting this not-yet-married couple about to have a child?

Shunned by their relatives, Mary and Joseph are left to give birth in a stable.  I think of the comfortable, sterile birth environments we try to create, and then I think of a smelly, dirty stable.  No candles or aromatherapy or even hospital cleaner smell; instead, animal poop. No bed that sits up on its own with the press of a button.  I know they didn't have those in that day anyway, but I imagine no bed was a step down from whatever Mary was used to.

And perhaps worst of all, Mary is alone.  With her new not-quite husband who she probably doesn't know real well. Perhaps a compassionate relative or the local midwife is willing to help out and just isn't mentioned. For Mary's sake, I sure hope so.  Even so, here is a young girl without even the support of her mother.  Pacing the stable in pain.  Moaning and swaying and wondering if she can actually do this. 

The time has come, and it probably doesn't feel holy.  I'm not sure there was a beam of light coming through the conveniently placed hole in the ceiling.  And even if there were, I doubt anyone would notice.  Mary, in that "other world," her entire body and mind carried away in the incredible work of pushing a baby into the world.  I doubt she's thinking about the angel or this amazing Christmas miracle.  This baby may have been the Messiah, but that didn't make transition any less intense.  

Joseph...I mean, what is Joseph thinking?  He's probably scared out of his mind.  This isn't the day of husband-as-labor-coach.  There were no birth classes or books or videos to prepare him for what to expect.  He had probably been kept far away from the birthing process in the past, and suddenly he is thrown into the center of it.  He's never even slept with Mary, and here he is getting really intimate with her in a way he would have preferred to avoid.  Kevin said he was a little traumatized by watching the pain and difficulty of my first birth, and that was after the classes.  Poor Joseph.

I think there was probably some screaming.  The little halos magically floating over everyone's heads are doubtful, but there was definitely sweat.  And blood.  Baby Jesus had a placenta.  Let's just pause to think about this aspect of Jesus' humanity, which also had to be birthed. When Mary saw that baby Savior for the first time, he was red and wrinkly and covered in just-born gunkiness.  He might have pooped all over Mary.

I imagine Mary lying back in the straw, shaking from exhaustion.  She looks into the face of her messy, wailing baby and marvels at his birth.  She feels relief and terror and a rush of  crazy postpartum hormones.  Joseph looks on in amazement, overwhelmed by a flood of protectiveness for this baby that's not even his own.  And still kinda scared out of his mind.

And let me tell you, there was crying.  That whole "Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes" - what, was he sick or something? (Or is crying supposed to be sinful for a baby? I've got big problems with that!)  This is a newborn we're talking about.  And since those stupid lowing cattle just woke up the baby, Mary is probably crying too.

Then the shepherds show up.  I know this is amazing and the angel told them to come, but I don't remember an angel notifying Mary of these unexpected visitors.  She's just had a baby.  She is exhausted and overwhelmed.  She is dirty.  She is bleeding.  Who knows when she slept last. She's pretty much a mess. 

She is trying to figure out how to nurse this tiny baby. The culture was probably not quite so freaked out about breastfeeding as ours, but I still doubt she is excited to practice with an audience of strange men.  Breastfeeding a newborn takes a lot of concentration, and it's practically impossible to do discreetly.

But here come these shepherds.  Dirty, smelly shepherds and they're wanting a look at her just-born baby.  Maybe they even want to touch him.  I imagine they're a little bit awkward.  Visiting a newborn baby, much less a stranger's baby, was probably way out of protocol.  I'm glad they told Mary and Joseph about the awesome angel display and all the "Glory to God"s.  They probably could have used a reminder of holiness.

The shepherds leave and Mary settles back to ponder what has just happened.  She thinks of the pain and the pushing.  She thinks of the wonder of that first cry.  And now, she remembers the angel who came to her a lifetime ago.  Thinks of the angels and the shepherds, and can these events get any more bizarre?  She holds her baby and tries to comprehend how the world has just changed.  She gazes into the eyes of the helpless baby Messiah, and she catches a glimmer of messy glory.

[Linking up with Velvet Ashes on the theme of birth]