Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Crying Through This Holy Instant...

I cried a river, two lakes, and an ocean last night.

It sure seemed like it was because the kids had broken another one of my favorite Christmas decorations. I didn't so much as bat an eye earlier when one of the wise men lost his head. I still had two all intact, and I figured two heads were better than one.

...And it's true that I might have felt a "slight twinge of annoyance" when my singing Christmas tree lost an eye, but I think I handled it just fine.

...But for some reason, this was different, I was so angry at first, and then just so very, very sad. There was no pretending I wasn't. You can't hide tears like that. They just came and came and came...

Thank God, I had the Holy Spirit and His thought system to turn to. I remembered that I'm never upset for the reasons I think. I could consider that it was really my home in Heaven that I was missing, and I couldn't help but notice my tremendous temptation to project the blame for my experience of separation onto my children. I might as well have been saying to them, "I lost God, and it's all your fault!"

Instead, I didn't say anything. I just picked up the broken Christmas doll, threw her in the garbage, and grabbed Jesus in a choke hold.

Those kids all got together. One of them pulled the dolly out of the trash and performed a duct tape miracle while the other wrote the sweetest letter of apology my eyes have ever read. The baby was sleeping soundly in his manger, I mean his bed, and for the rest of the night we were all just love.

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