07 December 07 - 13:02
Getting into the Christmas Spirit
My house was decorated in red on Wednesday morning by my five year old son, who decided to toss his yogurt tube down the stairs – apparently a faster way of getting it to his backpack than by simply carrying it – and was surprised when it burst on the bottom carpeted step. We were running late for school, that part wasn’t a surprise, and cleaning up red dye number 2 from the bottom step simply wasn’t on my schedule for the morning. I lost my cool, I confess, in the face of the unexpected.
I find myself, the older I get and the more I engage with family life, feeling for Mary and Joseph, who also found themselves in the face of the unexpected. The Bible doesn’t say if they lost their cool when they found out what was in store for them. A baby on the way, and Mary an unmarried teenager. A baby on the way, and Joseph knew he wasn’t the father. It makes the yogurt incident look like a walk in the park on a crisp, sunny December day.
God doesn’t very often ask us for things that are easy. Sometimes I get a little ticked off with God about that, but really, over all, my life is easy, without very many of the sorts of surprises that come with angel visitations. Why don’t I more often see how good this life is? A little while ago, my husband and I were talking about how hard it is to raise a family and keep two careers going, how hard it is to juggle the needs of five very different people and not drop balls all over the place, how we seem to fail on a daily basis. Typically, we were in the van at the time, on our way from one thing to another. I looked across at him in the driver’s seat, and I realized that we weren’t cutting ourselves very much slack. “You know,” I said, “This is hard stuff we’re doing. We should be congratulating ourselves that we’re managing to do it at all, rather than getting down on ourselves because we aren’t doing it perfectly.”
So I shouted at my son this morning. He kept a stiff upper lip, rare for him, and somehow managed not to cry in the face of my disapproval. Then I went and got a rag and told him to wipe up the mess while I got him a new snack for school. Then I tucked him into his snowsuit, and before I sent him out the door, with seven minutes to make a fifteen minute walk to school, I kissed his sad and beautiful face, and told him I loved him. “I love you too, Mom,” he said. By lunchtime, we were all laughing about it.
I expect that’s how Mary and Joseph coped too. That’s what people do. One blotch of spilled food, one sticky kiss, one “I love you” at a time.
Blessings, Heather.
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