The Seed of Hope

Part 1 of our Christmas Series

Maybe it’s a symptom of getting older, but I’ve reached the point where Christmas is no longer enjoyable; it’s just another season to “get through.” Maybe if I were married with children, I could see the point in the rituals and traditions of the holiday season, but I spend most of December waiting for Mardi Gras to begin. I’m not muttering a bah humbug every time I receive a Christmas greeting, nor am I plotting to steal presents from the citizens of Whoville. I just don’t care anymore. What is Christmas outside of celebrating Jesus, and why should it mean anything to me?

The Jesus part keeps me engaged, but the Jesus part makes it difficult. Mediating on Jesus means reflecting and evaluating life, and there is no worse time of the year for me than the last seven days spent reflecting on the previous three hundred and sixty-five. It’s been a mundane year. It’s been a year of waking up, going through the motions, and staying awake to go to sleep so I can do it all over again. I’ve spent a good chunk of this year asking myself, “What’s the point?” Many of my prayers start with asking God, “If this is the best you’ve got for me, then why are you keeping me here?”

Hope. I’ve been struggling to hold onto hope. Defined as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen,” hope should be easy, but I don’t have the energy. Expectation and desire are missing from my soul; I feel that absence with every step I take. A friend recently asked me what I truly desired, and I didn’t have an answer for him. I know what I used to desire, but I no longer see the point in praying for those things. I don’t have a vision for my future, and with how things have been, I don’t know if I trust God has a good plan for me. What do I expect from God? I stopped expecting things from him because part of me believes He’s done with me. A preacher once said, “If you’re not dead, then God’s not done.” This quote used to be encouraging, but now it’s a reminder that the hamster wheel will keep spinning until He tells it to stop. I’ll keep circling the four walls of this season until he opens a door. My only hope is that he will open a door, and I need that tiny sliver of hope to be enough, but faith is hard when the future is foggy, and visibility is low.

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.

Isaiah 9:2

The people walking in darkness refers to a specific group of people, but this is a common theme in the Christmas Story: suffering. John the Baptist paved the way for Jesus with his execution, and Jesus paved the way for us by shedding his blood, but before we get to that part, we have an insecure king, a genocide, and a pregnant teenage girl. I often think about Adam and Eve in the garden after they ate the fruit and brought sin into the world. Did God feel the strain of that separation, and did it hurt? Did he suffer? His greatest creation betrayed him, and in an instant, He had a plan for reconciliation. He already loved us, but how much greater was that love after a broken heart?

It must have been disappointing after centuries of suffering and silence to find hope in a manager. To hear story after story of this great Messiah, only for him to arrive hidden and vulnerable. Maybe that’s the point. Roses aren’t born in bloom; they start as seeds. Hope isn’t fully realized until it’s time; it has to start somewhere. Hope began under the threat of divorce and death and was then planted and nurtured in a little town in Galilee. Thirty years later, hope was buried in a tomb only to bloom into a resurrection. It’s been a year of brokenness and hopelessness, of desperately finding a reason to wake up in the morning, of searching for a promise in the pain. It’s been a year of walking through pointless suffering; at least, it feels pointless to me. But every Christmas, I’m reminded that suffering produces promise, and in between the seed and the bloom is perseverance. The greatest rescue mission of all time began as a seed in a field of suffering and disappointment. Maybe, just maybe, there’s enough soil in my soul for God to work.