Category: Christmas

Advent, Christmas, Faith, Family, Hope, Personal Reflection, Prayer

God Does Not Sleep

Carrie Sue Barnes

Christmas doesn’t always bring a person home to a warm hearth and an idyllic pause in the strife of our days.

I typically post only on Facebook about my sister Cheryl’s battle with aggressive, advanced lymphoma. Periodically, I have asked for prayers and support from family and friends while sharing the current status of the fight. The nature of the battle now brings me here, to a broader collection of family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers.

Cheryl will spend Christmas at the Mayo Clinic hospital in Rochester, MN. Under the superb care of their doctors and nurses, she and her beloved husband Tom are awaiting the delivery of her genetically modified T Cells to be transplanted back into her ailing body. These cells, with newly gained superpowers, will try their hardest to attack the cancer cells that have spread and grown in recent months. She has literally been sustained this month by chemotherapy and steroid treatments, biding her time until the T Cells are ready.

As Christmas, that must joyous of celebrations, approaches, the only gift my faithful sister hopes for is life.

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Cheryl, her husband Tom, and their children Catrina and Ryan, 12/14/19

I can’t write that without tears streaming down my face. At least once a day, I let the tears fall and plead with God to restore Cheryl to health and vitality. I release the valve for a few moments and allow the sadness, anger, and feeble hope to rise to the surface. Cheryl’s warrior spirit has taught every member of my family the astounding depth of true faith and strength that come from a divine source.

From-the-heart honesty: I don’t want any more lessons. I want healing. I want Cheryl to land on the right side of the statistics and odds. The only thing I want us to learn in the weeks to come is that miracles do happen.

Please add your prayers to mine. I rest in this: God does not sleep. He does not look away. He does not set us down from our place in His hands.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.

 

He will not let your foot be moved,
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

 

The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade
on your right hand.
The sun shall not smite you by day,
nor the moon by night.

 

The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and for evermore.

Psalm 121

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Cheryl, me, and my children Annabelle and Timothy, 11/24/19
Christmas, Family, Intentionality

Listen to Your (Inner) Three Year Old

Carrie Sue Barnes

My three year old gets it. All that is necessary to fill him with excited anticipation is to tell him we are going to do something together. The activity matters little. Togetherness is the key.

During the brief forty-five minutes we had this morning between him waking up and me departing for work, he must have asked ten times for me to spend time with him. The asking comes in a variety of forms – will you sit with me; can we watch a movie together; are you going to eat with me – but the heart of the question is constant: Can we be together?

Connection; companionship; unity; family. It is my belief that we do not lose our early years’ desire for togetherness. We grow adept at minimizing its significance, quieting its voice. We learn to ignore it. We all have our own reasons for doing so.

With each instance in which I must reject my son’s request for time with me because I am required to be elsewhere, my heart hurts. Yet there are plenty of times where I also turn him down carelessly, preferring that he leave me alone to do the things I’m more interested in that day or the things I think have to get done. I am imperfect in it, without a doubt, but having children has reawakened my own desire for and value of togetherness.

This isn’t written with undue guilt. We cannot be there with them non-stop. Jobs, obligations, responsibilities, and even solitary endeavors are both necessary and valuable. Yes, my children have to learn the hard lesson that they are not at the center of the world they occupy nor can they count on always receiving what they want from others. My thoughts run less along the line of eliminating those lessons and more along the line of wondering what society, and specifically my own family, could look like if alongside those harder lessons everyone also learned that we do not need to guard our hearts against the natural desire for togetherness.

Final request of the day: “Will you rest with me?”

What if I said yes more often, both to my son and to my own timid longing for greater togetherness? What if I factored it more strongly into our Christmas season plans and my New Year’s resolutions? What if I replaced “not right now” with “yes, we can be together” as much as possible? It would be a difference maker for the good, I am sure of it.

Advent, Christmas, Faith, Family, Hope, Jesus, Scripture

The Paradox of Suffering and Hope at Christmas

Carrie Sue Barnes
Photo provided by Trisha Hummel

Today is my cousin Trudi’s 44th birthday. It is her 23rd birthday in eternal life. I was still stumbling my way toward my teen years when Trudi was murdered. Trudi and her older sisters were thick as thieves with my older sisters while I was just one of the little cousins in our extensive family circle. I remember her as cool; fun and beautiful; bold and humorous.

This weekend I spent hours addressing Christmas cards. As I scribbled the names, streets, and cities of my cousins, I couldn’t help wondering about Trudi. Would she live in the same area, like her sisters, or would she have established her life elsewhere? Would we have attended a wedding? Would our children have played together by now? Would we have that comfortable, enjoyable dynamic that develops between family members after the years have placed us on level ground?

Hypotheticals. They do an excellent job of muddling the mind and stinging the heart. There’s nothing like loss to leave you wading through a pool of hypotheticals. And there’s nothing like Christmas time to amplify the wound of loss.

This isn’t a direct quote, as I can’t remember where I heard it, but I once read that St. John Paul II said suffering is created by feeling cut off from good. We live and love and link ourselves to sources of good. When one of those links is severed, we are left trying to patch the tear.

What has severed a link to good in your life?
Death
Divorce
Job loss
Infertility
Disease
Rejection
Betrayal

Every cut in our connections to what is good is felt keenly in this season of celebration. For some, the suffering renders Christmas undesirable. Potential joy is swallowed up in misery. Sounds of peace are drowned out by the roar of hypotheticals that can never be.

Oh, the paradox of Christmas. For Christmas, my friends, is the arrival of the Divine Response to every wound and cut and tear you carry with you. It is Almighty God dwelling amongst us. He made Himself vulnerable to encounter our vulnerability. God entrusted Himself to the arms of a mother, to the home of an earthly father, and to a community of imperfect, suffering individuals.

Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst

Christmas is the issuance of God’s answer to our suffering, to our feeling of being cut off from good. It is a resounding song of hope: “You are not cut off. You are not abandoned. You are not lost. For I am with you. Here in the deepest cuts, I abide with you. I may have allowed pain and loss, but I fill the voids. I AM the source of all good and I AM here.”

Christmas, when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) is the root of our conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

Advent, Christmas, Family, Love

She Would Have Loved That

Carrie Sue Barnes

Two years ago my last grandparent, my maternal grandmother, passed away. Her death came in the week before Thanksgiving and so inevitably she enters my thoughts a lot in this holiday season. Similarly, it is summertime when my paternal grandmother comes to mind most often as my final memory of her was a family picnic at my parents’ house on a warm summer day. Sunshine warmed grass between my toes, family sitting in chairs in the yard, Grandma Theresa makes herself present with us. Now, in the bustle of family focused holidays and age old traditions, Grandma Evelyn is here with me.

Grandma Evelyn with my firstborn, a few months before she passed.

During Sunday Mass last weekend, I leaned over to my husband and whispered, “Grandma would have loved this men’s choir.” The rich, reverent harmonies could have been from any number of old albums of hymns she used to play on her cassette deck next to her favorite chair. I savored every song during that Mass, enjoying it on her behalf.

Then at the end of Mass, I approached the giving tree set up near the sanctuary. Typically I choose a request for a child’s gift from these trees. It gives me a special kind of joy to know a young child will be happier on Christmas day thanks to a small sacrifice on my family’s part. It was with this same intention that I went to find this year’s star on the giving tree. But what did I find on the first star I read? A little Christmas wish list for an elderly woman that could have been my grandmother’s list pretty much every single year. My eyes filled with tears and I swallowed a lump of emotion in my throat as I plucked the star from the tree. I get to shop for my Grandma.

When I read that Christmas list and kept thinking, “she would have loved that,” with each item, I realized something I hope I won’t forget. Remembering our loved ones gone from this world is a special thing but loving on others with the very love your heart has marked for the ones you lost is immeasurably greater.

Advent, Christmas

Oh What a Month!

Carrie Sue Barnes
A month and a day since my last post and what a month and a day it has been! Three days after that post, I became engaged to my boyfriend of 1 1/2 years. Matt proposed to me at my family’s Thanksgiving gathering. It was a sweet, surreal, memorable moment and I’ve barely come down from the clouds since. Even with the expectation of our engagement coming about before the end of 2011, Matt still managed to surprise me on the occasion of his proposal. Not once in the midst of cooking turkey and baking pies that morning did it cross my mind that I might be engaged before the afternoon has passed.

Since that Friday, we have managed to schedule our date at our church, with our priest and with the reception hall of our choice. Yesterday we chose a photographer. The rest will wait until next year. It is an exciting, praise-God-for-His-plans time in our lives.

And now we come to Christmas. That annual feast that never ceases to bring a spirit of expectation, joy and warmth, no matter how many times we celebrate it. It is the mystery of that Child born in the humblest of circumstances, that He can reach through the centuries and still touch the hearts of each of us. Even those who don’t realize it’s His doing! The spirit of excitement and love takes hold in us all to some degree. Let it in! Let it fill you up! I pray that this Christmas pours its spirit into our lives, spilling over to all whom we love. In between the cooking, the cleaning, the gathering, the gift giving and receiving, and so on, may we take a moment to contemplate the Christ Child!

Christmas

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

Carrie Sue Barnes

“I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” – Linus

My nephew & godson Henry was quite cooperative for this little photo shoot. He’d been Charlie Brown for Halloween (black pants, yellow shirt with a zig zag stripe drawn on it, and a naturally big, round head made for the easiest costume ever) and come Christmas time we realized we couldn’t pass up the chance at this picture. I can’t stop smiling from looking at it so I knew I needed to share. I dare you not to break out in a grin and hear Linus’ poignant monologue begin in your head.

“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!”
“Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about…And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ …That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

Advent, Christmas, Jesus

Christmas is coming…

Carrie Sue Barnes
I don’t know about you but it can be awfully hard to remember what I’m preparing for during this season. Okay, not that hard. I mean, I’m buying presents, baking cookies, listening to Advent themed sermons on Sundays. Obviously it’s Christmas that we’re preparing for in these present weeks. Better put, it can be difficult to appreciate and understand the result of that which we’ll celebrate on the 25th. Contemplation is a lost art. Stillness of mind and heart can seem impossible or even counterproductive. We always have to be doing enough, saying enough, moving enough. I’m as susceptible to this as anyone. But if I quiet down and hold still, what might I find?

I might find that God is with me. I might find His presence to be full of consuming, transforming peace and joy and hope. All the things we wish for one another in our greeting cards, we’re walking through life surrounded by. They hang about us like the particles in the air of this room, invisible until we stop moving and look at where the light shines brightest.

Mary knew how to do it, always “[keeping] all these things, reflecting on them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Joseph knew how to do it, aware that the actions he took to be the guardian of the Savior were more important than any words he could speak. So our record of him in Scripture holds no words of his own, only listening, hearing the Word of God guide him, and acting upon it. Simeon knew how to do it, waiting and praying year after year for God to reveal the Messiah. His preparation made him know that Messiah the moment he saw the Holy Family enter the temple.

“Don’t we love the word ‘with’? ‘Will you go with me?’ we ask. ‘To the store, to the hospital, through my life?’ God says he will. ‘I am with you always,’ Jesus said before he ascended into heaven, ‘to the very end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20). Search for restrictions on the promise; you’ll find none…. Prophets weren’t enough. Apostles wouldn’t do. Angels won’t suffice. God sent more than miracles and messages. He sent himself; he sent his Son. ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14).” (Max Lucado, Cure for the Common Life)

With a little practice now – taking a bit of time each day to pray, reading through the Scripture story of the arrival of my Savior, thinking over this extraordinary truth as I perform ordinary tasks – maybe come December 26 and into the new year, I won’t forget that God is with me. Christmas brought Emmanuel, “God With Us,” but every morning brings another day that He is with me, another day for me to acknowledge and thank Him for being with me, another day to speak and move and act in a manner that declares I know He is with me and I choose not to forget.

God is with us… may we always remain with God.