perfect (adjective)— having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be; also, absolute or complete, as in a “perfect stranger”; and even though I know there’s no such thing as a perfect person, I try to be anyway and then when I fail (as I inevitably do) what then, I wonder? what then?

Most Advent wreaths are a circle, living green branches going around and around without beginning or end, with the Christ candle white and pure in the center. This one is a spiral, starting at the far edge and winding closer and closer with each day of Advent. I light one candle a day instead of one a week, and as the days of December go by, the outer candles shrink and the light grows and the anticipation builds, and then all at once there’s only one candle left in the very center: the Christ candle.

And it’s perfect, still. Tall and smooth, it’s top narrowing to a white wick, not charred black and pinched off like the rest. All of Advent leads to this: to Jesus, the Perfect One. And it’s here in the exhausted dark of the morning, when the only glow comes from these twenty-four candles, that something catches my eye.

 

It’s a flicker of light caught in a glassy drip. The pooling wax at the top of the candle closest to me has spilled over, rolling slowly down the side, and the light of twenty-four candles dances through it. I watch its gradual fall; follow the trail down the side of the candle as it slowly clouds over and cools; see it puddle at the base of the candle; watch the spot of wood disappear beneath the tiny blot of hardened wax.

So strange. This liquid, rolling down clear and unhindered, is the same material that forms the hard, opaque pillars. For that brief moment, the heat from the flame melted it and it fell like an unchecked tear, and the candle is marred by it: instead of a perfect white taper, it’s now bumpy and uneven, with jagged edges and mounded folds at the base.

It’s like I’m seeing this for the first time, this metaphor for Advent… and Christmas… and really all of life. We’re all trying so hard to make the things in our lives not just look perfect, but be perfect. But when Truth comes, like the burning flame on the candles, the forced chokehold we have on our lives softens and melts away, exposing the truths about ourselves we’ve long hidden.

Disappointment. Guilt. Sadness. Shame. 

All these and more, and all names for this:  

I thought it would be better. I thought I would be better.

Advent is this lighting of candles, this walk toward Christmas, but part of that walk is realizing the desperation that called for Christ to come into this world in the first place. The sickness and the dying; the broken promises and failed relationships; the hard things we wake up to and struggle through day after day after day. Even at—or especially at—Christmas time.

But peace comes. Because waiting at the end of Advent is this one great Truth; this one great Grace.

For God so loved.

For God so loved the world, it says. And in that, it’s saying God so loved me, in all my failures, seen and unseen; God so loved you, in all that you are not but want to be; God so loved us all in spite of all that we are, that he gave his only son Jesus to us at Christmas. Jesus, who is as perfect and whole as the Christ candle at the center of the Advent wreath. 

Jesus comes to us and wraps us up in a love that says, “You don’t have to be perfect. Just rest in me; me who is perfect love incarnate. In my perfect love, you will find wholeness and peace.”

And something about that love changes the way I look at those melted candles. Something about that love takes the rippled wax—the ripped places of my heart—and turns them into arms upheld to a God who takes hold of me and never lets go.

interruption (noun) - something that causes a stoppage or break in the continuity of another thing, and technically it could be a hindrance, too, but honestly, I’m finding that more often than not the break(ing) is as important in its own way as the continuity.

“Compassion interrupts our lives.”

That’s what my pastor said this past Sunday morning in his message. As I stood near the back of the church, rocking my fussy baby and trying to get her to take her morning nap there in my arms, I couldn’t help but give a bit of a sigh. As a stay-at-home mom of a toddler and a baby, it sometimes seems like my life consists solely of interruptions and multitasking, as well as the half-completed tasks and frazzled mental state they leave in their wake. I wasn’t sure I could handle any more interruptions, whether they came about because I was moved by compassion, or moved by a desire to stop my toddler from peeing on the floor. Or something like that.

Don't get me wrong: I agree with it one hundred percent on paper. How many times in the Bible have I read that Jesus’ ministry was interrupted by someone asking for healing for themselves or for a loved one? And he never says, “Sorry, but I’ve got too much on my plate right now… saving souls and all that.” No, he stops what he’s doing, not because he has to, but because he’s moved by compassion (Mark 1:40-42; Matthew 14:13-14; Matthew 20:29-34). Which kind of makes me think that maybe these weren’t just disruptions of his ministry, but the very means of it. The way he got to people wasn’t with high-sounded arguments or ideals, but with his acts of love. It was through his ministry of allowing himself to be interrupted.

Now, that’s something I need to live out better with my kids. I realize that it’s in and through those disturbances that the real work of motherhood happens. But still… by the time 10:00 that night rolled around, I’d about hit my limit. I was standing by the stove, stirring a pot of applesauce and hoping that it hadn’t burned too badly during the time it had taken me to soothe Caleb after his nightmare (another disruption!). As I did, I was scrolling mindlessly through my newsfeed, half asleep and barely seeing any of the posts: in my head I was mourning the fact that the much-needed, 8-straight hours of sleep I wanted so badly was extremely unlikely.

And then my gaze caught on a post from a stranger in one of the mom groups I’m a part of (I’m really cool, I know), and my eyes filled up with tears.

See, in the post, a new mom shared that she was at the children’s hospital with her baby, who had been given the damning label of “failure to thrive”. Breastfeeding hadn’t been going smoothly for her and her baby was refusing formula, so she was sending out a desperate plea for donor milk.

Here’s a truth I didn’t know until I had a baby: breastfeeding is hard. Sure, it’s natural, and it’s definitely kind of a superpower… but that doesn’t mean it is easy. For me, it’s up there with childbirth as one of the most difficult things I’ve done. With Caleb, I had a bazillion issues on top of the normal aches and pains of figuring it out: thrush, mastitis, and weekly clogged ducts on my end; difficult staying latched on Caleb’s end. Eleanor has puked on me almost daily for three straight months as we tried to figure out her reflux issue: it’s only recently that this unfortunate trend has slowed and we’ve narrowed the cause down to a dairy allergy.

But in all of this, neither of my babies ever stopped gaining weight. Neither of them had to be hospitalized because I couldn’t get them the nutrients they needed, whether through breastfeeding or pumping or formula. And so when I saw that stranger’s post… when I imagined myself in that new momma’s shoes… well, cue the waterworks.

Interrupted by compassion? You bet.

And so that’s why my applesauce again went untended (although this time I turned off the stove before it could burn). See, I had literal gallons of expressed milk in our deep freezer, most of which had been pumped before I cut dairy from my diet. It was useless to me because Eleanor couldn’t eat it without throwing up. But it was perfect for this new momma’s sweet little son.

It didn’t matter at all, then, that Eric and I had to sort with numb fingers through what felt like a million 4-oz bags of frozen milk. It didn’t matter that the children’s hospital was a 40-minute drive, one way. And it didn’t matter that what would turn out to be another broken night of sleep had gotten that much shorter.

All that mattered is that we’d allowed ourselves to be interrupted by compassion. In a weird and completely unexpected way, God used what we had: a freezer full of unusable expressed breastmilk. And the next night, as I stood on my porch hugging this stranger-turned-friend, both of us with tears in our eyes, I was absolutely sure of one thing: interruptions are the heart of ministry.

question (noun) - a sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information (although sometimes it’s maybe just one small word carrying the weight of a whole world; and sometimes maybe that one already-unsteady word just seems to echo out and out and out, becoming even smaller, until it disappears… or rather is caught in the arms of Love Himself).

Ask the questions that have no answers.
 

So goes a line in one of my favorite poems. And oh, I have been. Recently it seems like that’s all I do. Why… why… why… over and over again, as often as a little kid….

I’m sitting in a stiff chair in a hospice room, nursing my baby. Across from me sits a couple who have been married for sixty-eight years, and one of them is dying. His soul is already halfway home, his eyes looking more to heaven than to earth, and his body breaking down bit by bit. It hurts my heart to watch them, because when I do, I slip into their shoes, imagining what that will be like someday. When I look their way, my heart starts crying, “Why, God? Why is he suffering so much? Why does a body fail so slowly? What’s the reason for this drawn-out pain? Why?”

The questions that have no answers.

I duck my head. I blink back tears and watch my baby nursing. And in the days that come, the days that lead up to this man’s final homecoming, I pray these questions and others like them over and over again.

Why, God?

Not a week later, the news of another loss reaches me. That evening finds me standing in the shower, crying where nobody can hear me and where all evidence of my tears will be hidden. After all, what right do I have to cry? This other news I’ve heard is heartbreaking, yes, but it’s not my pain.  My two healthy babies both lie asleep in cribs, breathing peacefully. Our family pictures are whole and happy. What right have I to stand there, braced against the wall, and sob as if I’m the one who’s lost a child? But the broken picture of a family in the middle of that haunts me. The stories I know of others who’ve lived through that rise up, and it’s for them that I cry now. It’s for them, and their pain I cannot understand, that I ask the question again. “Why give a child only to take them away?”

The questions that have no answers.

I tilt my face up into the stream of running water, as if that could somehow clear my thoughts enough to provide some semblance of an answer. But it doesn’t. There isn’t a complete answer anywhere this side of heaven, and so the question remains:

Why, God? 

And then, the even more impossible question:

What now?

Sometimes, for all their bleary-eyed confusion, wakeful nights bring clarity. Sometimes, when the silent stars fade into the pale pink of morning, we are left with something that, while not an answer, has at least the semblance of a way forward. I sit alone, watching a glory of a sunrise take invisible, night-dark clouds and turn them into fiery orange blooms with dusky purple hearts. I feel the wind breathe by me, stirring the leaves into wakeful chatter before it slips in through my window. I hear the clap of wings as a string of birds takes flight, singing their hearts out as they glide up and away. And as they do, my own heart whispers,

What now?

And a quiet voice whispers back this apparent non-answer:

Give thanks.

I don’t think that anything we could say or do in moments of heartbreak is really able to ease the sting of great loss: these shallow thoughts won’t bring healing or peace to those wrestling with the questions that have no answers. But I think the reason we find ourselves asking these questions is because it brings us to our knees, empty-handed, because our hands must be empty to receive. And the small gift I received in the clarity of the early morning light were these almost-forgotten words, and they were as close to an answer as I could come.

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.*   

There is no answer to why suffering is prolonged, or why sorrow swallows up things that are good and beautiful. There simply isn’t.

But to leave my focus on the wounds of the world leaves no room in my heart for the Healer to do his work. And He does work: in the sunrise out my window; in the rough warmth of my husband’s hand in mine; in the brightness of a song trickling through the radio… the list goes on and on. Those small things, those tiny gifts from God, are not dependent on anything in this world, and if they aren’t then neither are the big promises he makes us. And His answer to all of us in this heartbroken world is this revelation:

Behold,I am making all things new.

Not “I will make all things new”: that would be some far-off day we may never see.

Not “I have made all things new”: because how could that be in light of these ageless, unanswered questions?

But making— what wild hope there is in that one word! Right now, as we speak, He is doing something. And so He calls us to ask the unanswerable questions right in the middle of our grief, so that in so doing we can also whisper thanks for the answered promises that exist all around us... knowing that he is making all things new.

Right 

now.

*Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts