Advent Ghost Town, Part Three

Those two lost Christmases, really, are a metaphor for all the lost time of my youth and young adulthood.

Lost time that remains a sort of ghost town in my memory, a desolate expanse lurking underneath and sometimes surfacing, triggered by sights and sounds and…holidays.

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Coming to terms with near lifelong emotional and spiritual abuse – that includes extensive time in cult-like environments with heavy control, manipulation, and harm from parents/leaders – is a liberation in the most literal sense. I won’t detail it here (though I’ve spoken of it elsewhere), but this liberation is a more recent development for me, and it has had untold healing effects on my marriage and family. In fact, this liberation has been something like waking up to the beauty of my wife and kids and our life together for the very first time.

In this sense, Christmas this year is especially poignant, because the waiting of Advent in the ghost town of a weary world really will give way to the authentic and tangible celebration of hope, healing, justice, and beauty in my life. Those stolen Christmases – and all the years since – have actually been restored. There is new life in the land of the living, and vindication where there was once so much despair and desolation.

The other day it snowed quite a bit and we went outside, all of us, to play in it. I ran really fast while dragging Gemma, the 3 year old, in her sled behind me. We came around the corner and up the little hill in the front yard, right to where my wife was about to send Pippa, the 2 year old, down the little hill in her sled. I caught a quick glimpse of the flush-cheeked smile on my little Pips, while Gems was still laughing, as hard as I was breathing, in the sled behind me.

And there.

Right then.

I was absolutely sure that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me, but that this, all of this, every frozen minute of it, is my life as it was always meant to be lived.

And it is holy.

And it is spiritual.

And it is divine.

All of it.

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Christmas is about Incarnation, but Advent is about waiting.

And nothing captures the pregnant expectation of that waiting quite like Mary’s Magnificat:

My soul declares that the Lord is great,
My spirit exults in my savior, my God.
He saw his servant-girl in her humility;
From now on, I’ll be blessed by all peoples to come.
The Powerful One, whose name is Holy,
Has done great things for me, for me.
His mercy extends from father to son,
From mother to daughter for those who fear him.
Powerful things he has done with his arm:
He routed the arrogant through their own cunning.
Down from their thrones he hurled the rulers,
Up from the earth he raised the humble.
The hungry he filled with the fat of the land,
But the rich he sent off with nothing to eat.
He has rescued his servant, Israel his child,
Because he remembered his mercy of old,
Just as he said to our long-ago ancestors –
Abraham and his descendants forever.”

Down from their thrones he hurled the arrogant rulers. Up from the earth he raised the humble and oppressed. Because he remembered his mercy, his promise, his covenant.

Brother Dawson and my abuser are no match for this Powerful One, whose name is Holy. This ghost town, this weary world, these memories of stolen time and shipwrecked dreams, all of them are fleeting, temporary, a passing mist, because our Deliverer is coming. Though we may sit in the pain for a night, joy comes in the morning.

So as the Advent candlelight slowly burns toward the daybreak of Christmas, I will begin to declare that the Incarnate Lord is great.

And I will exult in God our Savior, our Liberator, our Deliverer, even in the midst of this Advent ghost town.

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[Part One]

[Part Two]