Christmas.

I know it’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, but it never really is for me.  And it definitely isn’t this year.  I’m trying, mostly so it can still be special for my kids, but this year has left me pretty faithless and pretty hopeless, and I can’t help but face this celebration with a lot of heartache, and more than a little cynicism.

I know it sounds terrible for me to say that.  It’s part of why this blog has been mostly silent lately.  I’m afraid of being judged for admitting that I just can’t see God in any of this – for being angry at how silent He has been through this whole mess.  I’m afraid that some people will say it’s somehow proof that we’re wrong – this sense that God is not being our defender or helper when we have most needed Him to be.  But I mostly just don’t care anymore what anyone else thinks.

Yes, a whole lot of our hope and trust was misplaced.  And now, though everyone wants to just say move on and get over it, we struggle to even see an alternate path to go down.  We trusted people who proved untrustworthy.  For more than six years – crucial years in establishing a sense of home and relationships and faith in our children – we invested our lives in things that have now been stripped from us.  Every week, at least, I find myself searching real estate listings – sometimes not too far away, sometimes hundreds of miles away – because here doesn’t seem to be possible any more. The problem is, for all we’ve already lost, we have to lose more if we leave, with nothing anywhere that really makes us believe we could ever find a safe place to call home.

And it’s hard to find hope in any of it.  It’s hard to believe in a good and faithful God.  It’s hard to rejoice in anything so intangible like the significance of Christ’s coming when everything else in life feels like we’re fighting losing battles.  It’s not that there haven’t been lessons, I’m just finding that what we’re learning doesn’t seem to be valuable enough to justify the cost.

So about all I can do right now is not run away.  I can do my best to say the right things and do the right things and grasp at whatever fleeting hope there is in my heart that God has a plan for all of this that will be for our good in the end.  Not much of an advent lesson, but maybe – in some small way – it is.