Faith Archives - Page 8 of 15 - Kristen Anne Glover

Linger

The coffee cup is hot in my hands. I sit under the Christmas tree in my empty house and loop my fingers through the warm handle, mesmerized by the twinkling lights reflected in the inky blackness of my cup.

The frenzy is over. All the Christmas presents have been opened and put away. Our guests have come and gone. Up in the loft, the air mattress exhales softly next to a pile of quilts waiting to be washed. The fridge is choked with leftovers and Christmas cookies grow stale on the counter. Five limp stockings hang by the fireplace.

Out in the world, under the rush of highways and the urgency of clocks that never cease, stores are hauling out next year’s calendars and Valentine’s candy.

The message rings loud and clear: Christmas is over. The curtain has closed on the show we’ve been building up to all year long, and there is nothing more to look forward to but the cold emptiness of January.

We’ve barely cracked Jesus out of the Styrofoam and plunked him in the manger on Christmas morning when it is time to pack him up again.

There’s something very backwards about that, I think, and I feel the need to linger here a little longer under the twinkling lights on the carefully-crafted stage, believing with all my heart that Christmas is not the end but the beginning.

All the awful expectation, the groaning under never-ending Advent days, the weariness of waiting for a cure that will not come—is over. He has come.

Finally, I am free. I am free from the empty striving of the holiday season and the vain attempts to produce peace and joy by my doings. Here, in the days after Christmas, I find my rest.

I sit in the midst of beautiful adornment and I think that now, now, all the glory is appropriate because now my rescuer has come. Now, the Son has dawned.

Now we can begin to celebrate, now when most everyone is packing away the ornaments and hauling the tree to the curb.

But oh, I do not want to pack it in now. I want to throw open the curtain, cut the ribbon, and begin here. I want to sit under the lights and let the incarnation in.

Linger.

Dwell.

Worship.

Wonder at the brightest beginning we could ever hope for, the beginning that trumps all other beginnings, the page-turner that leads into a beautiful New Year’s and lovely Valentine’s and the glorious climax of Easter.

This is where the story starts. Christmas day is over, but Christmas—Christ with us!—has just begun.

Grieving Together

*For Sue, and all the mamas who have lost a child through failed adoption.

She is a dark-haired little girl with chocolate eyes and a sweet smile.

She is the little girl my friend held in her mind when she thought about what her family would look like, one day. She saw two sandy-haired boys and a little girl with those deep, brown pools of chocolate eyes.

The blond-headed boys came along the natural way, but God never gave her a girl. Time passed the way time does, and the family of four settled into the years. Still, this mama-heart felt that her family was not complete, not yet.

Then God made a way. Out of nowhere, like snow on a sky-blue day, a little girl came into their lives. She had never had a home with a mother and a father. She had never had a place where she was safe and loved, where people hugged instead of hit.

The best part of all was that this little girl already had a place in their lives! They knew her, and she knew them. When she came to their home, it was like the missing piece of the puzzle had been found.

With joyful expectation, we rallied around this family, praying for God to work through the adoption process. It was easy to pray when it seemed so obvious what God was going to do. It was the only thing God could do, because I’d already figured out that it was the very best way He could redeem this situation.

Didn’t it all make sense?

But just yesterday, I opened my computer and saw the message: the adoption failed.

I stared at my screen in disbelief. We all knew something like this could happen, but none of us expected it. We expected God to overcome the obstacles and make the paths straight because that is what God does.

He just didn’t do it this time, at least, not in a way that my eyes can see.

All I could think about was my friend, sitting in her home just a few streets away, grieving the loss of the little girl she had already began to love like a daughter.

I did not know what to say. How do you comfort someone who has lost a child through a failed adoption? No one talks about it like a loss. It’s just an unfortunate set of circumstances that didn’t work out like you’d hoped.

But it is a loss, and it stings like death. A woman like that can’t keep her heart from loving a child that might be hers, even if that child is born through a different body. She can’t help but make a place in her heart, and to grow in love in the waiting the way a woman grows in love for a baby growing in her womb.

The truth of it is, my friend had already started to become that little girl’s mother. That part of the adoption had not failed.

What do you say to a mother like that? What do you say to the woman who has cuddled the child she thinks will be hers, who has begun to dream dreams for that daughter and has spent secret hours shopping for bedroom furniture in white and pink? What do you say to the woman who has prayed for that child and held her breath, hardly daring to breathe in case it does not happen, and who now, in the absence of a child to hold, finds herself grieving alone because the rest of us just don’t get it?

It’s hard to know what to say. “How are you doing?” I blurted out yesterday when I called, even though I knew perfectly well how she was doing and I knew better than to ask something so trite. But we say things just to fill the void because we want to help, and we find that we can’t.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“You can always try again.”

“Maybe God is opening your home for another child.”

They hurt, those words, even the parts that are true, even the parts that are spoken out of genuine love and concern, because they don’t recognize that this child had already started to become her child, and this child has been lost.

And there is a mama who is crushed because of it.

I do not know, but I imagine that she tries hard to convince herself that it will be okay, that this little girl will be safe and cared for wherever she goes. But how can she be any more wanted? How can she be any more loved? How can this be God’s best for this child?

The hardest part of grief is always the questions it brings. They are the questions none of us can answer and most of us have trouble asking because they seem so devoid of faith. I think part of faith is trusting that God can love us even when we’re hurting and can’t find the right words, or even when we tell Him we don’t understand His ways.

He already knows it.

It seems silly to try to put a band-aid on the pain with words, whether they’re words to God or words to one another. Sometimes, there is nothing to say.

There is only grieving together.

In Defense of Black Thursday

It’s that time of year again when people give thanks with one breath and complain about retailers in the next. It seems there’s always something to be unhappy about when it comes to the people who sell us our stuff, especially around the holidays.

This year, most of the grumbling has been about the latest scandal in retail. Not only are more and more stores opening for Thanksgiving, but businesses are luring honest-to-goodness Americans away from their family dinners with Black Friday prices.

Black Friday prices on Thanksgiving? What is the world coming to!

Apparently, there are many reasons we should stand strong against this trend. One of the loudest arguments is the fact that no one should have to work on Thanksgiving. Everyone deserves a day to spend with family, and those greedy corporations are robbing their employees of their turkey rights just to make a buck.

That’s a lovely sentiment. I do not think any worker should be obligated to come in on Thanksgiving when the turkey is roasting away at home.

It’s just too bad we’re so inconsistent about it. We get ourselves in a tizzy over the fact that Walmart employees have to work on Thanksgiving while we sit at home flipping through the channels of football on TV. We watch the Thanksgiving Day parade and the half-time shows as if none of those people are working or away from their families on Thanksgiving.

Well, that’s different, we say, because that’s not commercialism, and really, that’s what we’re against. It’s the commercialism. We don’t want anyone sacrificing family in order to make money.

Really.

Why do you think Al Roker sits out in the cold and broadcasts the Macy’s parade every year? Why do you think the football coaches and players and cheerleaders and hotdog sellers and bathroom cleaners get up and make sure the big game goes off without a hitch?

They do it for money, on Thanksgiving, away from their families, and we support them all the way.

But it’s different, we say, to actually go out and shop on Thanksgiving! That proves that some people are more interested in getting a deal than spending time with their loved ones, and that’s just terrible. They’re probably not even grateful.

Well, I’m convinced. I’m not working on Thanksgiving.

I mean, I’m not getting paid to slave away in the kitchen with a cold bird. I’m also not planning to shop (I’ve got a date with the aforementioned cold bird, after all). I’d feel really good about that except for one problem: I don’t think my Thanksgiving choices make me any more of a grateful, family-centered person than the woman who hits Walmart at 3 am.

Nor do I think Americans are going to turn into the Monsters of Materialism because they get an extra shopping day. Most of America is already there.

It seems to me that we’re all overacting a little bit about this whole shopping-on-Thanksgiving thing. It’s not like Thanksgiving is a sacred institution (it was ordained by Congress, after all).

Don’t get me wrong. Thanksgiving is a good day, and a lovely idea, but it’s not gospel, and we shouldn’t treat it like it is. You’re not going to earn extra gold stars in your heavenly crown if you stay home and eat turkey and think thankful thoughts this Thursday. I dare say, you could even celebrate on Friday instead of Thursday and remain just as holy.

Conversely, standing out in front of Best Buy for a few hours before the kids wake up in order to get a good deal on a TV does not necessarily make you a bad person, any more than sitting in front of your TV on Thanksgiving makes you a bad person.

It kind of depends on what’s going on in your heart (FYI: always). You can have a pretty ugly heart while mixing up the cranberry sauce. And you can be perfectly joyful and godly while shopping on Thanksgiving.

Maybe we should all settle down a little bit and stop equating Black Thursday with a moral apocalypse. After all, our world is crumbling under the weight of bigger problems—bigger moral problems—than retailers who slash prices for Thanksgiving and the people who fall for it. Maybe, if we let go of our turkey-induced legalism, we will notice.

That is what Thanksgiving is all about, isn’t it? Noticing. We should be so grateful for what God has done for us that it overflows into actions for others and shows up in how we treat our family and how we love our neighbors. Even the shoppers.

But too often, we care more about how people spend their holidays than with what’s going on in their lives.

“It’s just wrong to shop on Thanksgiving, and all the people who do it are bad. The end.”

We don’t consider the veteran who needs to work on Thanksgiving just to pay the bills or the mom who has to spend Thanksgiving alone because her kids are with their dad. We don’t think about the fact that sometimes, holidays at home are hard and it’s easier to spend the time walking a store aisle than navigating the eggshells around the dinner table.

What if that guy in line at Best Buy is there because his apartment is lonely this time of year, and for all the church people he knows, not one of them invited him to share the day with them?

Sure, some of the shoppers are materialistic jerks. But before cluck our tongues and say these people have their priorities mixed up, maybe we should think first. Maybe the Thanksgiving shoppers aren’t the ones with the problem.

Maybe we are.

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