Hope

It was five years ago today - a bloody show the size of a quarter, and thus began a very dark time. The baby was only six weeks old. Old enough for facial features to start forming and the heart to be beating around 100 times a minute. Old enough to have captured my heart.
I hardly had baby when suddenly it was gone. The cramps of the miscarriage didn’t even come close to the spasms of my heart that manifested themselves through hot tears, numbness, anger and collapsing in the light of the moon in the front yard in bitter grief. For a while I wondered how I was ever going to go through Advent and celebrate Christmas when I felt loss in every cell of my body. But it turned out that Advent began to heal me.
The moon has always been a sign of God’s faithfulness to me because I have always been able to see it’s orb regardless of which continent I have been on. And so, getting out of the car after spending a very lonely time in an ER corridor because I had been forgotten, I was surrounded by the glow of the moon and knew that I was not forgotten by God. In trying to sooth my aching body in the shower the next morning, I couldn’t help but whisper- sing, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” It comforted me just as much as the running water.
Advent that year taught me what it is we are really waiting for. It is the hope and comfort that comes from knowing the God with us. Knowing Emmanuel. I was able to celebrate the birth of a baby even after the death of my own because the child that was born 2000 years ago, lived so that death does not have the final word. That is what I clung to, and that is what I rejoiced in even with an ache in my heart that has never quite vanished.
My prayer for you is that you find the hope of the King-child this Advent season.