Light for Those Avoiding Christmas
By Jon Walker
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. Isaiah 7:14 (NIV)
As I write this, I am sitting in a fast food restaurant observing a young girl, maybe five-years-old, celebrating an early Christmas with her mother. Her presents are spread out across the booth and she just said, “I miss you, Mommy.”
“I miss you too, baby,” her mother says.
Beyond their booth I see a woman casually, but carefully, watching them. Using my trained journalist’s eye, I put it all together: The watching woman is a social worker supervising a structured visit for mother and child, who are doing the best they can to celebrate Christmas in the booth of a fast food restaurant. A few minutes later, the foster parents arrive to take the girl home with them while the mother leaves alone.
There is a darker side of Christmas that we rarely acknowledge. We create this fantasy of the perfect homecoming that rarely matches reality, even in the best of homes. There are many of us whose Christmas memories are full of tension, not tinsel.
Some of us know that the holidays are just another excuse for Mommy to get drunk or for Daddy to be with his new family. It’s a reminder that the one we love the most is far away or perhaps never coming back.
Would it surprise you to know that the suicide rate is extraordinarily high in December, and that depression is as common as “Joy to the World”? I suspect there are far more people who hurt at Christmas than we would initially imagine.
For those tired of the hollow hope and the false fantasies of Christmas, the good news is that God is with us. A virgin gives birth to a son, and his name is Immanuel (God with us) (Isaiah 7:14).
If you’d like to receive these devotionals regularly, you can sign-up at www.gracecreates.com/subscribe/. Jon Walker writes from www.gracecreates.com. He is a Zondervan author, and the former writer/editor of the Purpose Driven Life On-Line Devotionals. This devotional is copyrighted 2008 by Jon Walker. Used by permission.
