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Christmas comfort in sorrow

My daughter had a really bad day a couple of weeks ago. She had grown quite close to a baby who was staying with us for a few weeks. She loved holding him and giving him his bottle. Occasionally, she even would change his diaper. It came time for him to go home.

Even though she knew his leaving was inevitable, it led to sobs of sadness. She cried the kind of tears only those who have felt deep sadness understand. Just as she was getting hold of herself, she found her pet bird lying lifeless on the bottom of the cage. The tears began to flow again.

She is only 10, and I hate for her to feel that kind of sadness so early in her life, but I am glad that her deep sorrow was triggered by something so meaningful, and not simply because she didn’t win a game or get her way in some unimportant matter. Deep sorrow only comes from deep loss. Deep loss only happens when life has deep meaning.

There is always plenty of deep sorrow to go around, but perhaps during the Christmas season it is more ubiquitous, but less recognizable. We are supposed to be happy during the Christmas season. It is easy to hide the sorrow behind the decorations and talk of a merry season. There is nothing wrong with finding happiness in the birth of our savior even if there is a deep, nagging sorrow in our life, but there is an opportunity for real healing in the advent of our savior that we should not overlook.

In the incarnation of Jesus, God shows his desire to share in our deep sorrow by walking the rugged path of this life. Jesus experienced the pain of broken relationships, the frustration of physical limitations, the isolation of betrayal, the aching sorrow of the death of a loved one, the onslaught of relentless temptation, and every other pain to which the human soul and body is susceptible. He even experienced the dread and the reality of his own death.

God knows deep sorrow because he has felt it firsthand. Like a doctor who not only knows the treatment for sickness, but has gone through the sickness and found healing, God heals, he expresses real empathy that can only come from experience.

The original Christmas story itself is marked with deep sorrow. There is the loving husband-to-be whose fiancee is pregnant by someone other than himself. There is the isolation of the soon-to-be-mother relying on her carpenter husband to help her through her delivery. Jesus and his family become refugees fleeing the government. They travel over 40 miles, most likely on foot, from Bethlehem to Egypt. Then, of course, there are the weeping daughters of Rachel, inconsolable because of the murders of their sons.

All of this reminds us that God touches us deeply, enabling us to live deeply and love Him and one another deeply. We do this in the power of the resurrection, knowing that living and loving deeply inevitable leads to deep sorrow. This sorrow is the heavy price we pay to live meaningfully.

We pay it because we know that there is consolation in the God of all comfort who comforts us with the comfort he needed when he walked this earth. We risk sorrow because we know that sorrow will not have the last word in the life of a follower of Jesus. One day sorrow will be completely swallowed up in victory — the victory we share with the One who shared in our sorrows. He is the one whose birth we celebrate Christmas Day.

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Finding Faith is written by area pastors. This week’s column comes from Rev. Steve Salmon, pastor of First Church of Christ, Lock Haven.

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