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.
