"Dost Join Us and Our Children In Our Weakness"
On Christmas burdens and God's foolish wisdom
Christmas Eve. A bright cacophony of excitement and noise, rushing and mess. I’d mixed more meal preparation for post-baby and Christmas meal preparation, which meant deboning two roasted chickens, making a huge amount of soup from scratch, cooking potatoes and bacon for a morning egg bake, plus trying to clean up the still-wrecked kitchen from the day before. The kids were helping, then not, in and out and disappearing. I still had—have—all of the Christmas gifts to wrap (yes, you read that right), plus service clothes prep and other cleaning.
I was not in a good place.
Everybody finally pitched in, and we got things done. We had our now-traditional meal, soup with sausage, cheese, and crackers. Jon and our eldest left to get to church early. I cleaned up again while the rest of the kids dressed for the Lessons and Carols service. When they all were in the van, I stood momentarily in the dark kitchen with my coat on, wondering if I could muster the energy to get through the rest of the evening. I didn’t have much choice. We had to go.
Christmas can be hard sometimes.
We made it with a few minutes to spare, squeezing into a pew with dear members close to where the kids and the adult choir would eventually stand. Because of course, every single one of us, even beyond the pastor and organist, was involved in some way.
The service started. The six-year-old kept pulling tissues out of the box I’d brought to wipe her nose and red, chapped lip, her mouth open as she scrubbed at her lip. The pew around her soon looked like it had snowed indoors. The three-year-old tried to hold up his boot to show other members across the way. “I found ‘em!” he crowed, along with other comments. He and other kids kept picking up and moving the tempting unlit candles in the hymn book holders in front of us. The teenager fidgeted and picked at his face incessantly, the tween annoyed her closest sibling neighbors. Basically, aside from the candles, it was the usual evening service happenings.
Thankfully, we had a good stretch of time to just sit and listen and sing before we had to get up and do anything. I could hear other kids rustling and murmuring around us, other parents shushing and calming and working. We sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” a congregation of distracted sinners. My exhaustion at my own inability to do what I thought I should, from baby prep to Christmas prep to innumerable other jobs, mixed with my guilt at not doing what I knew I should. Love my children and my husband without multiple layers of requirements and resentments I foisted on them. Receive the Word without relegating it far, far down my to-do list. Release my death grip on the illusion of control I continually try to keep. Repent.
My burden started to leech away. So many familiar carols about the Christ Child lying helpless in a manger for animal feed, coming in the very form of we pathetic, lost, dying people, joining our mean estate and our meek souls in our dreamless, clueless sleep.
Dear God, You were a fool, I thought suddenly. How could you have possibly thought, let alone joined, this broken chaos?
So much weakness.
The kids got up to sing “Joy to the World.” One three-year-old posed with her arms raised in an arabesque salute, another sat, then stood, then hopped. Another small one casually joined the group, then drifted back to his parents. And there the rest were, lustily or lackadaisically singing, “Let men their songs employ.” They recited Luke 2, their mouths confessing words some could scarcely understand.
We adult choir members joined them, singing “O Jesus Christ, Thy Manger Is,” some of us grasping hands of wiggly preschoolers or giving Mom Looks to older kids. We started verse two.
He whom the sea and wind obey
Doth come to serve the sinner in great meekness.
There, God’s own Son, with us art one, Dost join us and our children in our weakness.
And this is why we are here, I thought. Not because we have it all together, but because we are complete and total dumpster fires of lack, not only unable to sustain ourselves beyond our short mortal lives but so often actively dismantling and destroying what we’ve been given. The whirling and squawks of kids in the sanctuary are small, very small, reflections of the same in the adults trying to keep them still and quiet.
And He joined this—this. His lungs breathed the same foul air, his eyes saw the same gristly ugliness, his fists grasped the same coarse and dusty material we do. We don’t deserve this sharing. He definitely, certainly, absolutely didn’t. Yet here He is.
Thou Christian heart, whoe’er thou art,
be of good cheer and let no sorrow move thee!
For God’s own Child, in mercy mild,
Joins thee to Him; how greatly God must love thee!
Soon, this morning, we will go to church again and receive Christ’s body and blood, His Real Presence, for the forgiveness of our sins. We will taste and see that the Lord, our fleshly and resurrected King and Savior, is good. The rest may fall apart and does, for this short while. Parents are exhausted and bereft. Widows and families mourn. Loved ones fear and wait for better health for sick other ones. Christ comes for us, and He is coming for us again. He is our relentless, ever patient and steadfast Wisdom.
The world may hold her wealth and gold
But thou, my heart, keep Christ as thy true Treasure.
To Him hold fast until at last
A crown be thine and honor in full measure.
Merry Christmas.