Ugly Tree, Happy Memory: Birth of Redemption

Hi all ~
If you’ve experienced suffering (and who hasn’t) then maybe you already know how God can transform it into something beautiful. It took me a while to figure this out but now it shines bright like 1,000 twinkling lights on a puny tree in things that I know — really know.
May you know it too. And, rejoice!
Merry Christmas! ~ Love, Lara
In high school, I remember driving to the Christmas tree lot with my mom. It was close to Christmas so by the time we arrived the only trees left looked like they belonged on the Island of Misfit Toys — assuming the island’s castoffs were conifers instead of spotted stuffed elephants, a wannabe dentist elf named Hermey, and a choo-choo train with square wheels. These trees were lopsided and skinny with dehydrated needles that fell off if you brushed against them.  Even in the dark with the blurring glare coming from street traffic and the strings of lights snaking their way from the mouths of fluorescent orange extension cords, you could tell the trees were ugly.

So, of course, my mom bought one.

And, I know Charlie Brown’s sparse Christmas tree with a single red bulb ornament evokes a certain sort of nostalgia that reminds us of the true meaning of Christmas. But I was a teenager. I hadn’t lived long enough to acknowledge there is beauty in the broken. I still saw the world as two-dimensional. Black and white. Good or evil. Generous or selfish. Happy or sad. All of the color that exists between things just felt chaotic and confusing.

I had yet to reconcile how Jesus could be born a King in the midst of smelly farm animals or why he would love a bunch of sinners or give us free will to decide whether to love him back or why he would choose forgiveness over justice.  Basically, I didn’t understand redemption, neither the ugly Christmas trees nor my own.

Over the years, I’ve experienced the way our sufferings — those unwelcome feelings of loneliness, loss, rejection, and disappointment can be transformed into something beautiful. I’ve seen how we become strong in our weakness; compassionate in our sorrow; and how hard times soften us. All of life’s brokenness that we don’t want, don’t deserve, and didn’t ask for, has a way of making us more whole when we let God’s love and mercy transform our suffering. We celebrate Jesus’s birth at Christmas and it is new and shiny and hopeful. But he didn’t come here to be shiny. He came to save. The reason we celebrate his life is that ultimately, he redeems ours with his death.

That’s heavy stuff to ponder when we can easily focus on stacks of presents, twinkling lights, or perfectly decorated Christmas trees.  But I tell you it’s the best part of Christmas – this realization that redemption is continuously available to us. This knowing that with God there’s a place for misfits and that no matter what we’ve done or how far we’ve strayed, God isn’t going to isolate us on some snowy island. He’s going to embrace us with the warmth of his love. Transformation that adds color and dimension to the pieces of our hearts which have become flat and jaded is possible. This is the redemption that is born on Christmas Day and that is available to us throughout the year.

This is the redemption that I couldn’t recognize as a teenager but that I see all these years later when I think of my mom as a single parent taking me to pick out a tree. On the car ride home, we laughed about the mostly dead evergreen we just bought. We decorated it and with its gaping holes and spindly leaves, it stood as a lopsided witness to that year’s Christmas.  All these years later it still stands in my memory – an ugly tree; a happy memory.  In between, the birth of redemption.

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Pain: It’s Not that Interesting (but You are)

We all have a story and often we are afraid to tell it.  It’s the part of us that doesn’t come up in our social media feeds or in casual conversation.  I get that.  I don’t tell all of mine.  All any of us can do is share what we are comfortable with and hope whoever we trust doesn’t use it to cause pain.  Most of us have already experienced enough of that.

I think I was in college when I first realized that everyone has a story that maybe is a little bit broken.  It was a relief to know that other people had hurt and healed or at least hurt and found hope again.  Not because I didn’t have hope, but I just always hated the thought of being alone, different, and the only one.  And, yet, I think we all feel like that sometimes.

Now, instead of feeling alone, I am sometimes overwhelmed by how much suffering exists in our world.  Betrayal, pain, grief, disappointment, longing, and loss are part of our human experience.

What I realize is that despite life’s mistakes and meandering hurts, the universality of pain diminishes what feels monumental from defining to just one more destination on what we hope will be a long journey.  Maybe that’s why God thought it was so important for his son to live our humanity.  Jesus suffered beyond the comprehensible and yet it wasn’t what defined him.  From conception through infinity that was always love – not loss.

Everyone has a sad story.  We just have different details, characters, and plot twists.  It’s not the pain that makes it unique, it’s the way we find our way out that makes it interesting.  It’s the way we forgive valiantly that is heroic.  It’s the way we choose healing over hate that can inspire others to do the same.  It’s the way we love through loss that we choose life.  And, always, we should choose life.

I love to hear people’s stories but it isn’t their pain that makes them interesting.  A friend who has recently been through a hard time said of her own hardships, “I now think, it really isn’t interesting.  But I am! I’m interesting and I have so much love to give.”

What the heck could I possibly say after that?

As, always, love says it all.

Can you look back at difficult periods of your life and see the blessings that came from them?  If not, my hope is that you will soon.  God is transformative.  Let him write you a new story.  

Read more here: Mercy! Being Mama is Hard

Mercy at the Bus Stop

I was doing my teenage Uber driving duties and thinking about the advice that encourages parents to talk to children in the car.  After all, they are a captive audience, don’t have to make eye contact (because God forbid, we have any of that), and both parent and child are physically restrained –that might not have been among the reasons listed but it does seem worth noting.  We were on the return portion of our journey into silence and I was lamenting the misery of it when I looked out the car window and saw a man sitting on a bus stop talking to himself.  Our eyes met and for a moment he silenced.

He was smoking a cigarette in the mid-day Florida heat.  I checked the temperature on my dash and it read 98 degrees.  I considered my relative comfort in the air-conditioned car and the ice cream in my freezer I planned to eat when I arrived home as a consolation from both the heat and the unwelcome hush of angst that tormented my drive.  I recalled the smoking man in the intolerable heat, sitting in solace, speaking to himself.  I thought of that moment our eyes met, and how for the first time that day I felt seen.  It mattered not to me what I was seen as or how I might have looked or what he might have thought of me. The moment reminded me of the universality of God’s mercy at a time when I felt somewhat desperate for connection.  I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but through him, I saw a reminder that suffering is not the only thing that is universal, God’s mercy is too.

While I consider my circumstances are likely better than his – the reality was at that moment, I felt as miserable as I perceived him to be.  It’s easy to compare ourselves to others.  We have standardized what we consider justifiable levels of loneliness, pain, emptiness, and grief, and if it doesn’t fall on the spectrum of horror or woe that we heard on the latest podcast then we feel like we need to buck up and go write in our gratitude journals.  Before I understood the mercy of God, I would have thought the same thing.  There were so many times that the pain and challenges in my life became a wedge in my relationship with God because I didn’t think I had the right to seek his mercy.  I didn’t bring God what appeared to be trivial and trite by the world’s definition of suffering because it felt too small and I had been given too much.  The problem with that thinking is that it separates us from God and from the mercy that heals, comforts, and forgives the wounds in our heart.  We may not be worthy of God’s mercy or deserve it.  Regardless, it pours out of him – a gift of unfathomable consolation that we choose whether to accept.

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Sunburn and Silver Linings

The last day of vacation I woke up with a tingling feeling on my lips.  When I looked in the mirror, even through the blur of twilight I could tell they were noticeably fuller — like the fairy godmother of plastic surgery had visited in the night.  I checked different body parts to see if she had generously waved her wand in other places too.  Sadly, it was just my lips.

As lucidity set in, I realized that my pink pout was the result of a sunburn from a long day of scalloping with friends and family.  I had taken the necessary precautions to protect my skin.  I wore a sunscreen shirt, a hat, and covered my face in so much SPF that I looked like a geisha on holiday.  Although I remembered the SPF lip balm and even reapplied it along with my milky white sunscreen, it was not enough to protect me from hours of swimming and sunshine.

I cringed thinking of the resulting sun damage and started down the long twisty road of lament and regret I know so well.  Then, for the love of mercy, I had a thought that I have considered often recently.  It framed itself as a question in the highlight reel of my mind:  Why would you ever think you would get through life unscathed? 

Life is full of losses.  We lose money.  We lose jobs.  We lose time.  We lose things that are dear to us.   We lose people we love.  We lose. No one likes to lose either.  We live in a world that tells us life is all about the win.  We are encouraged to minimize cost and maximize gains.  While that makes good sense in a lot of sunny scenarios, the reality is, sunburn or not – none of us get through life without experiencing a burn.  Accepting this as part of our humanity somehow dulls the sting of it.  Perhaps, so much of our suffering is exacerbated by our resistance to it.

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