Alone in a Crowd: When You're Lonely at Christmas

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What's not to love about Christmas? It's the birth of Jesusthe fulfillment of the world's long awaited hopes. Christians celebrate it with a sense of joyful expectancy. Non-Christians can't help loving it toowith its presents, parties, and time off with loved ones. Most people rate it five stars.

But not everyone. For some people Christmas is rough. It's the big reminder that things aren't the way we want thema relationship that ended or never panned out. There is something about seeing all those other people celebrating, that heightens the feeling of pain or loneliness.

Why them? Why not me?

For me it was the Christmas my mother was dying. She'd been diagnosed with cancer right after my first child was born. Two Christmases later she was in the final stages. My far flung siblings came home and, together, we all tried to keep our family traditions. Somehow we managed to get a fresh treethough not a huge one and not one we'd cut ourselves.

We cooked the traditional food and Mom even came to the table. But things came apart soon after. Soon, we set up the living room as a hospital room with rented adjustable bed, commode, and piles of other stuff that would help us keep her home as she wanted. The tree was in the way. We took it downstairs and leaned it in a corner, ornaments and all. There just wasn't time to take them off, wrap them carefully, and put them away as she always did. It stood there for weeks, slumped forlornly in its dusty finery, like Miss Havisham with a Christmas hangover.

Sometime in the midst of this, my husband and I had to go home so he could resume teaching. On the way, we went to a party at his parents' house.

The tiptoeing sick ward I had just left had nothing in common with his raucous Irish householdall five siblings and their families, everyone talking at once, each one shouting at night club volume to be heard above the din. And me, leaning in an out of the way corner, decked out, worn out, lonely and out of place just like our tree.

I was alone in the crowd. No one knew how I felt. No one could.

It's not like I blamed them for being happy. In the lottery of bad years, this wasn't theirs. And if they didn't sit me down and try to pat my hand and draw me out, it was fine with me. There was not a lot I could have added to the conversations we'd already had:

How's your mother?

Dying.

How's your mother?

Still dying.

How's your mother?

All better. No, I was just changing things up. Actually, she's dying.

What could they do about it anyway? It just was.

I gave up and went to bed. And as I lay there, listening to the sounds of happy people whose bad year this wasn't, I realized I had a choice before me. I could go through the motions of life as usual or I could turn around and drive the two hundred miles back to be with my mother until she died. I talked to my husband and we resolved that I'd go back the very next day. It was only then that peace came, the peace of Christmas, the fulfillment of a long awaited hope.

If Christmas makes you feel lonely, and you just can't force the merriment, you're not the only one. That is how Jesus Himself came into the worldamid a crowd of people who were all caught up in their own plans, and no one giving Him a second thought. And that was how He wanted it. His life was aimed straight for one thinghis redemptive death on the cross. The baby lying in the manger, all cute with His halo glowing around him, is there to save us from our sins. By dying.

Which is why He cares when we're lonely or sorrowing at Christmas while everyone around us is celebrating.

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses... Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (Hebrews 4:15-16).

We have a Savior who gets us because He has been there too.

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