Grief At Christmastime
And learning resilience from believers in a war zone
Merry Christmas everyone. I’ve been a bit quiet on here for various reasons, including wrapping up quit a few projects by the end of the year and some medical situations in my family—nothing life-threatening, but still requiring our attention. I’ve also been doing several radio interviews for my book, The Characters of Christmas.
But I did want to share a couple of things as we head toward Christmas. First, while Christmas indeed is “my favorite time of year” it can also be a season that evokes difficult memories, especially if you’ve lost a loved one. As you know, we lost my mother in the Spring of 2023. Grief, I’ve found, comes in waves. I wrote about this for Christianity Today last year:
I’ve come to believe that grief is a gift, a human response given by God to help fill the space where our loved one once stood—a cushion against the deathly blows of a cursed world and a sign of hope that fuels our longing for the world to come.
I’m comforted repeatedly by the humanity of Jesus as he looked in on the decaying corpse of his friend Lazarus. John 11 seems to indicate that Jesus was both full of sorrow and full of rage.
The rage is just, for we are told death is the work of the enemy, the final foe that Jesus defeated as he endured the cross and walked out of the grave. It’s good and right to lament the loss of loved ones. To blithely skip past this anger at death is to diminish the way God values human life. To pretend it’s not a big deal when we lose a loved one is to minimize the ugly finger of Satan and to lessen the impact of sin.
I hope this helps you as much as it helped me to write it.
I also wrote a piece for National Review on the resilience of the church in Ukraine. I loved writing this piece for two reasons. First, I’ve been reading National Review my entire life, and its an honor to appear in the magazine that William F. Buckley started. Secondly, I was grateful to share with American audiences just how inspired I have been by our brothers and sisters in Christ at a time of war. Here’s an excerpt:
According to the Institute for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian watchdog group, 640 religious sites in Ukraine, most of them Ukrainian Orthodox or Protestant, have been damaged by Russian attacks. Evangelical pastors have been jailed, beaten, and sometimes killed by Russian forces. Russia has become one of the hardest places to be an Evangelical Christian, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Anti-terror laws prevent preachers from preaching the Christian gospel, and the government’s collusion with the Russian Orthodox Church restricts worship. That has been exported to the territories Russia has seized since 2022.
Yet I found the church in Ukraine to be resilient in the midst of war. One pastor told me that the war is “harvest time” for Christians, as many Ukrainians are turning to the faith for hope where others might despair. And it is the church that is meeting the spiritual as well as physical needs of besieged Ukrainians.
Despite the challenges, there is a steely resolve. The faith that has kept the church as the spiritual center of this plucky nation is the faith that will help them chart another chapter in Ukraine’s long and storied history. “We cannot endure without God” was the refrain at the Ukrainian Military Prayer Breakfast we attended on our last day in the country. And as we boarded the train to leave, a marching band played Christmas carols in the train station, as if in defiance of the enemy that wished to silence them. Maybe this kind of bold faith will be contagious, spreading even across the pond.
May it be so. And, to close, how about this quote from GK Chesterton on Christmas:
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
Merry Christmas!