Hello everyone! A Merry Christmas Eve to all of you! I hope that you are somewhere fun and surrounded by love or at least headed that way some time very soon!
Grab a cup of cocoa. Its story time on the blog…. Christmas style
I’ve been doing a lot of processing this Christmas. Christmas in my life has historically been a bit… roller-coaster ish. I was absolutely in love with the whole season of Christmas for most of my childhood. When I was in high school, however, a death in our family and a series of heartbreaks really made it hard for me to be excited and stay excited through the Christmas season. About 5 years ago, a sweet young man named Andrew asked me a rather significant question a few days before Christmas, which really helped reignite my appreciation for the love that this season can bring….
I just love that picture
My sister was standing by and grabbed it. Anyway, so since then, I’ve been slowly yet surely regaining my Christmas spirit. This year, I feel like I started the month of December on a major mission. I wanted to make Christmas in our home truly our own and not just maintaining the decorations and traditions of my youth. Not that the former isn’t awesome, I just felt like it’s past time for us to really figure out what Christmas means to us as the Humphries’ family. However, I started taking this in a funky decoration. I got caught up in decorating our home, getting my “Elf List” crossed off, staying (or not staying) within budget, singing lots and lots of Christmas music, making mixes for others and their Christmas cheer, cooking and baking my brains out, etc. About 2 weeks ago… it finally dawned on me that I was getting lost. I was finding Buddy the Elf’s Christmas cheer and singing awfully loud, but I was not finding anything that had to do with a star, an expecting couple and a promise to all of humanity.
So one day, I was sitting in our bedroom going through some books… I think I was trying to find something… anyway a little handmade book fell out into my lap that was called “Watch and Wait.” I sort of recognized it and opened up the first page. I realized it was an Advent book written by a well respected man in a ministry I’m involved in, called Young Life. I remembered that the book was given out last year at our Christmas party. I kind of tossed it over near my Bible making a mental note that I should look into that later. Note this occurrence and follow me to part B of my story, please….
At my church in Murfreesboro, we are currently going through a sermon series in 1 and 2 Samuel. There is a video a friend of mine made that gets shown every Sunday morning and it brings me to tears every time. (You can view it here.) One of the main reasons I weep is because the woman in video is my friend Hannah. She is praying the prayer of Hannah from scripture, a broken-hearted woman crying out to the Lord for a son. Our Hannah has also been crying out for a child for a long time. She and her husband have been trying to adopt domestically for several years now, and though I have no idea how hard that journey has been like like for them…I feel like the Lord laid them on my heart, and had this video become a part of my every Sunday for this particular Christmas.
Keep this sweet picture of Hannah in your mind and come back to the Advent book with me. I finally opened the thing up and really began reading it… and here is what I found:
“Understanding God’s own longing keeps us from hurt and offense at the Lord when He does not immediately answer the pain of our heartache. Our proneness is to think that God must not understand the pain of our desire when He does not answer us immediately. When we do not understand that our longing originated in His own heart, we are prone to believe that He has left us alone in this painful delay out of lack of sympathy for our suffering state. Our misunderstandings tell us that if He did know the pain we were in, He surely could not bear to leave us in it. Quite the contrary, when we trace our longing back to its source, we find the wounded-by-love heart of God. It is from the deep of His heart that our own groans come forth. He knows that without longing, we cannot enter into the fullness of His love, and therefore, in His absolute kindness and jealousy over us, He places within us the dagger of desire for Himself. These periods of unfulfilled longing are inexpressibly necessary to our journey of love. Of what worth is water without thirst? Of what value is fruitfulness without barrenness? What is desire satisfied without desire unmet? How our hearts need to go hungry before we are fed. We must encounter the depths of longing’s ache in order to ascend to the heights of Divine exhilaration….”
“We view our pain as the absence of God’s answer instead of the presence of it. God does not give Himself except to the hungry and destitute of heart, yet we cannot produce hunger for God. It is He Himself who causes hunger to arise and the prayer for fulfillment to emerge. He establishes in us the desire that He intends to satisfy. As surely as the pain of our longing is the certainty of His coming to us. When we begin to feel our own hearts moving in desire and in painful reach for God, we may rest assured that He will answer us. Where there is Divine longing, there is Divine fulfillment. Though we may be separated by a time gap, the two are so interwoven and undividable that you cannot experience one without soon knowing the other.” Deep Unto Deep by Dana Candler
Historically, it is recorded that the God of Israel moved and acted amongst his people for generations upon generations and then there was quiet. Four hundred years of a people longing in the quiet. He continued to care for them, watch over them, spin the Earth on its axis and cause their people to prosper, but without any communication whatsoever. And then, he decided to make himself known. To appease the longing of all of creation, through a baby.
Back to our beautiful Hannah. Her longing, suddenly gave me a picture I had never been able to put my finger on in regards to the coming of Christmas. About the same time I started having this realization of what longing could even begin to look like, a longing that swells up deep inside and turns you inside out, Hannah had an encounter with the Lord. As you can see in the picture of her above, she has long, beautiful hair. One morning, Hannah was getting ready and was drying her hair and suddenly she heard “Cut your hair“. I can only imagine what Hannah must have thought… “You’ve got to be joking… my HAIR?!” (That’s my supposition there) Then Hannah thought of our friend Tracey. Tracey is going through chemo-therapy at the age of 37. (You can read her journey here.) Tracey shaved her head a couple of weeks ago and has been facing this fight with so much courage. Hannah heard it again “Cut your hair“. Long story short, by Friday (as in 2 weeks ago yesterday,) Hannah and Tracey went to a salon together and Hannah cut her hair.
A couple of days after this, I was with Hannah at a party (one in Tracey’s honor coincidentally enough) and she began telling me this story of her encounter with the Lord. She then said to me “after so many years of only hearing ‘wait,’ it was so good to finally be told to do something. To have an action.” Then… on Friday morning, I walked into a friends house who was practically skipping through his house and he said “We have news! Hannah and Clay got a call and they have a little boy.” I literally almost passed out in the floor with excitement and then I said I started with all the who, whats, whens and where’s and my friend said to me, “You’re never gonna believe it, but he was born 2 hours after Hannah cut her hair.”
I have to pause at this because it makes me cry every time…. I’ll just show you this instead.
The longing that feels like it will never end… the redemption of an unanswered prayer… the coming of the Messiah…. its so real and THIS is Christmas.
You know what? I don’t know even know how to truly apply this to my life. I definitely don’t know how to apply it to a wedding blog. All I know is this: We are loved by an amazing God who never does anything that does not have a perfect purpose and a beautiful story. He is not a God of convention, but a God of creativity and uses so many things to get our attention. I’m so grateful, he dropped an epic story into my lap and buried it into my heart because I feel like Christmas has been changed for me forever.
Thanks for reading. I hope and pray that wherever you are, you are moved by this Christmas, that you know how special you are, that your story is important, and that you are SO loved.
Merry Christmas, y’all
Em
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