Merry F-bomb Christmas
For the Christmas lovers who also accept that sometimes it's F*#%@ hard
Please enjoy this writing by listening to the audio recording or by reading it below.
The other night after a bout of grief tore through our home, I sat in the hot tub - trying to regulate a jarred nervous system- with Sam (my hubby). And my mouth formed pretty much the only words I could muster in the moment. “Why is it so f*@# hard sometimes?”1
It just is.
And as the week has continued to unfold, and we get closer to the celebration of Christmas, those hits of hard continue to happen. Grief is not new to our family, and over the years we have learned to discover hope in the hard. We do this by trying to notice delight every day and trying to linger in the moments of joy found in the Christmas season.
For the last few years, I’ve embraced having a Word of the year. As the year wraps up, I spend time contemplating what words I’ll lean into for the new year. I loved the words that settled on my heart in late 2023. Words that seemed so wonderful for the upcoming unknown of 2024.
Hope and Delight
Hope - a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen, and beautifully the archaic definition of hope is a feeling of trust
Delight - great pleasure
I don’t think I realized how critical those words would be for me this 2024 - a year filled with more accumulated losses than any other years of my life. I attended more funerals this year than in my entire life combined. 2024 holds memories of rejection letters, friendships changing, major school changes and dreams put on hold. So much loss this year.
And wildly. So much delight. Hope still held in hands that are learning to hold hope more openly, patiently and curiously. 2024 has been a year that has taught me to hope differently. To trust that just because the design of life looks quite different from the blueprints I drew up 15 years ago or even one year ago, it doesn’t mean that what’s being built is bad.
Noticing the moments of delight and learning to trust differently doesn’t erase the hard or the loss. No, all of that hard is still there. All of the lost is still gone. But the delight and hope, - they are candle flames of love enveloping the sharp metal moments of life.
One of my favorite Christmas songs is Mary Did You Know? by Pentatonix. My favorite line closes the song. “That sleeping child you’re holding. Is the Great. I. AM.”
I can’t help but wonder how f-bomb hard it was to be Mary and Joseph 2024 years ago. Nine months pregnant and 90 miles traveled on a smelly, prickly and most likely stubbornly-slow donkey. 2.5mph for about 8 hours a day. My friend Tiff said that the speed bumps at our local hospital were the source of a pre-birth scream to slow down already! Her husband Matt joked that he was literally crawling over those bumps with barely enough speed to actually get over them!
Imagine the bumpity bump of a donkey for 8 hours a day for an entire week - that’s F-BOMB hard.
And then seriously Joseph? There’s nowhere to stay? Knocking door to door. Just hoping somebody will say yes we have a room. What the F-BOMB?2 Not to mention all of the continued processing of this less-than-conventional start to family building. Teenager. Unwed. Impregnated by the Holy Spirit… how many eyes had looked at her condemningly for the last six months? How many times did she avoid a place, a situation where she would have had to explain her divinely inspired life choices? Sure she said yes, but sweet Mary’s yes is another example from the text that saying yes to God does not mean easy or a delights-only excursion. It so very often means that life’s going to get F-BOMB hard for at least a little while.
Thank goodness Jesus knows how to meet us in the parts of life blowing up like FBOMBS. His entry on the scene - a precious newborn baby. I’ll never forget holding my newborn daughter. She was perfection.. All the f-bomb hard parts that led to meeting her felt worth it. The pain of loss and the unconventional journey we’d been on was eased for those initial mesmerizing hours. They weren’t erased, but there was relief. Meeting my daughter gives me a glimpse of how it must have felt for Mary to meet God in the mess of her world. And it’s in those moments of delight, the slowing down of time and the holding on to Jesus that we experience God entering into the disordered parts of our lives too.
The real-life nativity was surely more messy than its mild portrayal.
Life in its lifeness seems to throw f-bomb hard moments our way daily, but if we are looking we can see God’s mercy, compassion and love entering daily too.
So if you’re like me and wondering why is it so f*@# hard sometimes or even all the time (I’ve been there too), may this unconventional photo make you laugh a little and realize that Jesus enters all in - to the FBOMB hard.
His love highlights the holy and swaddles our hearts the way Mary once swaddled the King of Kings after her very own terribly hard and deliciously holy birth story.
Merry F-BOMB Christmas everyone.
I love Jesus and I cuss a little… (a lot?) probably subjective right. Also, I continue to try to reign it in - I know that cussing is not for everyone! If you’re reading this - maybe you haven’t given up on me!
I don’t actually think Mary used the f-word. I do wonder what an expletive would have been at the turn of A.D. and if there might have been an expletive or two during this really hard journey?! But it’s all just wondering.