Emmanuel, God With Us

It was the first Christmas after my husband left. My boys were 6 and 3. Though I choose not to go back to that place in my mind too regularly, I can still recall the feeling of that first Christmas Eve.

Truthfully, it took me years to get used to the fact that especially on holidays the boys' time would be split between my ex-husband and I. I just knew that I was on auto-pilot trying to get everything done to make our first Christmas special. I wanted to forge new traditions, make the special time in my faith life special for the boys, celebrate the birth of the King and try to get over this numb aloneness I felt so deep within my heart.

Christmas Eve was always spent with my husband's family in a wonderful celebration. We would go to an early family service and then celebrate with his side of family. But on this first Christmas apart the boys and I went to church, and then I sent them off with their Dad. I didn't want to go be with my own family (my parents or sisters and families) because somehow my solitary existence seemed magnified in the midst of these people who literally breathed life back into me through the most difficult time I've experienced.

I sang with the choir at my church, recognizing this nagging feeling of wanting to be with my children as they shared in all the festivities. The tears came easily and my heart was just overwrought with grief at the loss we were walking through. My heart wanted to soar as I entered the story again of that first Christmas. Yet, the pain I was in kept me from the true Christmas joy that I had always felt.

As I made coffee and laid on the couch praying through the pain, the phrase "Emmanuel, God With Us" seemed indelibly written on my heart and I began to repeat it over and over. As I lay there staring at the nativity set under the tree, I expressed my sorrow. Through the tears and even the deep gutteral sobs, I felt a softness in my heart, eventually. I knew intellectually that God was always with me, but on this night, I experienced it so deeply. I was certain that although I felt alone, that I really wasn't. And somehow I knew I never would be again.

Looking back now I think it was that first Christmas Eve that I was so racked with pain was really the first step of diving in deeper to my faith life. I look back now and can sense the pain of that first Christmas where everything changed--and where the brokenness of our lives seemed so amplified. But now, I can rejoice in the fact that nothing can separate me from the love of God. I have truly experienced (as has my family) the joy of Christ through others who shared their love and helped us through to find healing.

And I'm ever so grateful to have encountered first-hand this deep abiding love of God in that tiny babe: Emmanuel, God With Us. What a deep meaning those words have for me, even all these years later. Never alone.

May the joy of Emmanuel, God With Us be with you in a new way this Christmas season.

"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"—which means, "God with us." Matthew 1:23