My mind is having trouble conceiving that Christmas Eve has already arrived this year. As I child, the holiday season felt as though it took forever, creeping at a slow enough pace to intensify my desire for that much anticipated morning event where I would race down the stairs to see what Santa had set aside just for me. Waiting was difficult as a child, especially waiting for something as wonderful as Christmas morning. Perhaps that is when I first learned that to be hopeful, or to live with longing, could be painful at times.
As an adult, I have experienced this season in a very different way. The shopping and preparing that often takes place in the midst of the day-to-day management of life can serve as a sufficient buzz-kill. Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays once they actually arrive, but managing the chaos leading up to them is what I could do without. So instead of anticipation or excitement, there is busyness and hurriedness. The truth is, it’s been a long time since I truly longed for something or felt the agony of hoping and waiting.
I read a news story this week captioned, “A True Holiday Miracle.” It was about a young girl who was swept away in the 2004 Indonesia tsunami and thought to be dead. Miraculously the girl returned to her parents this week after being released by a woman who had discovered her shortly after the Tsunami and forced her to work as a street beggar. I imagine the hope of returning to her family was at times what caused her heart to ache the most and was also what simultaneously sustained her desire to live in the midst of suffering. That you girl held onto hope for seven years. Could there be anything more powerful than experiencing the fulfillment of one’s ultimate hope?
Recently I have also wondered if there could be anything so tragic as the experience of hope disappointed. A friend and fellow graduate of my alma matter was anticipating the arrival of his firstborn son in late November. The baby boy, already named Jackson Brave, was a week late when the couple discovered at their check-up that he no longer had a heartbeat. To experience the building anticipation of a long pregnancy, to struggle through the labor and delivery, for a child whose laughter you will never know, whose life ended before it truly began – that is devastation some will know, but few can bear.
I am trying to remember what it feels like to long for something desperately in these final hours of Advent. And in so doing, I can’t help but think of the women and children of the Acholi region in Uganda. They have endured over two decades of civil war, political unrest and life in internal displacement camps. But in the recent years, all of that has begun to dissipate. The rebel army has retreated, there is relative stability and they have been sent back to their family land. For many of the Acholi people, their hope has been realized. But for the widowed women, whose husbands died of violence, AIDS or other causes, their hearts are still aching for help. So perhaps I have personally forgotten what it is to truly long for new life, but through these women I am able to witness the ache of longing and the all-surpassing joy when one’s hope is actualized.