I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I feel like I’m walking in darkness. People say the world is getting darker, but when I contemplate all the horrors of the past that I have not experienced (World Wars, the Great Depression, a pre-antibiotic or anesthesia world), I will venture to guess that an intensifying darkness is only my perception. The world has always been dark. And since I had an abuse-free childhood, it makes sense that with age and wisdom comes a deepening understanding of the depth of the evil that has always shadowed the earth. Shadows my own heart.
Of course, I love more people more intensely than I used to, and thus, the more burdens I carry. I keep thinking that once my children are healthy, thriving, and successfully launched into the world, some burdens will be relieved. Until that is, I hear folks in the season above me praying for their grandchildren. Even Paul, who experienced shipwrecks and floggings, starvation and prison, lists his concern for those he loved and invested in as perhaps the heaviest burden of all (II Cor. 11:27-28).
It’s too bad that so often, the emphasis at Christmas is on all those warm fuzzy feelings that go along with family and parties and merry-making. We imagine that our lives in December should look like one big Norman Rockwell painting or Hallmark movie; when it doesn’t, those images mock us. How dare they look so happy when the world is so heavy? Maybe I’m just not in the Christmas spirit this year, we think.
But what if the dominant emotion of the Incarnation was never meant to be joy? What if it’s actually about hope?
When we consider the conditions of God’s people in the years before the Incarnation, it doesn’t get much bleaker. War, division, totalitarian power. But the worst part is that 400 years went by without a breath from God. Generations passed, people were born and died without any sign that the old prophecies would ever come true. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to hold onto hope.
Then, one day, an angel appeared to a peasant girl. Another appears to a childless priest. Pagan stargazers notice a strange phenomenon in the night sky.
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.
(Is. 9:2)
After so many years of sweaty, tropical Christmases, Northern Hemisphere Christmases still feel novel. Living near the equator, I didn’t experience Decembers that creep into increasing darkness but are then lit up by millions of pinpricks of light. These lights speak to me. Yes, the darkness is thick. But also, there is light. Not enough light to overcome, but enough to spark hope.
I tend to be a rather intense person. I’m not depressed, but I can be rather cynical. I absorb the sadness of the world and I catastrophize a lot, especially regarding my children. I regularly battle against anxiety and doubt. Does God actually care? Is He still working? Is there a point to prayer?
An unexpected surprise in my job is that I weekly experience stories of hope.
When people apply to be ReachGlobal missionaries, I read their applications. Through their own writing and references from the people who love them, I get a bird’s eye view of the whole scope of their lives. They’ve cracked themselves open and allowed me – a stranger – to get a peek inside who they really are.
Often, there’s darkness. Addiction, divorce, abuse, doubt, porn, depression, betrayal, fear – these are often a part of their stories. But then – like the flame of a match penetrating the darkness, the good news of the gospel completely transforms them. They become something new. Metamorphosis. And they can’t help but want to go to the world with the same message.
I immerse myself in these stories for an afternoon and emerge with tears in my eyes, no choice but to praise God because here is proof, slapping me in the face, that God still transforms lives. This is what hope looks like.
And on that night, 2000 years ago, when heaven entered earth in the form of a newborn, the world didn’t change as much as we would have wished it would have. But it set in motion a plan written before the stars were formed and sealed a promise that joy was coming. No matter how dark, how frightening, how despairing the world seemed, hope is alive.
And hope must precede joy. We sing “Joy to the World” and don’t often remember that it was not written in light of our Savior’s first arrival to earth but in anticipation of the second. And it’s only then that our joy will be complete.
Joe Clahassey
Another good blog, thank you.