Christmas Veiled In Loss

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

—1 John 4:9

For some, Christmas is a season of loss. Maybe it’s the first Christmas without a family member or dear friend, and your heart has been so wholly battered that it allows God’s presence and voice to seep into it at every turn. Or maybe a relationship broken this year hangs over the season like a veil. You are alone, freshly. A close friend of mine will celebrate her first Christmas alone, because her divorce became final earlier this year, and the man she fell in love with, hard, just after that, walked out of her life as quickly as he walked into it. She says that the loneliness is deafening sometimes.

I don’t know what you’ve lost this year: a life, a friend, a child, a dream, a job, a home. I don’t know what’s broken your heart this year, but I do know that whatever it is, you may feel the loss of it even more acutely at Christmas.

I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over.