The holiday season can be hard. Ads that show perfect families around the Christmas tree giving each other expensive cars, Grandma getting run over by a reindeer over and over again on the radio, bright lights and Black Friday hype….. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking we’re supposed to all have perfect families and and perfectly happy lives. Since none of us have perfect families and perfectly happy lives, it’s tempting to feel we need to fake it, and then we just feel alienated.
I am so grateful in this season of the year to have a job that compels me to keep remembering what Christmas is about. It’s not about perfect families–but about the promise that God dwells among us in our human imperfection. It’s not about always being cheerful, but about the promise that God bring joy from the depths of sorrow and pain and fear.
When we tell the Christmas story, when sing the Christmas carols, we are reminded that we do not have to fake it to celebrate Christmas. The message of Christmas is for us as we are–with our hopes and our disappointments, our sorrows and our joys, our failures and our new possibilities.
This year, we are holding a “Longest Night Service,” on Wednesday, December 21, at 7:30 pm. This service is held on the longest night of the year, as a way of honoring the reality of darkness in our lives and praying for the gift of light. It is a gentle, reflective service, which allows us space to name the complicated emotions that the holiday season may stir. It is a time to lift up the grief we feel at the loss of loved ones whose presence we will miss around the dinner table. It is a time to acknowledge loneliness and the ways our efforts to love sometimes fall short.
The service does not end with the darkness–for the longest night of the year is also the beginning of the days growing longer. Through the lighting of candles, we will claim the promise that the light of Christ illuminates the darkness and heals our brokenness, and lead us to true joy.
Come and bring a friend.