Waiting After Christmas

I sit amidst piles of boxes and stray wrapping paper as the chaos of the last few weeks comes to a pause. It’s an inhaled breath, held and waiting before we exhale back into normal. The holidays are coming to a close; with one last hurrah, we’ll ring in a new year, the list of holiday to-dos will be finished, and Hallmark and I will both go back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The days after Christmas always feel odd to me. For 24 days in December, anticipation and excitement brew, twinkling in our eyes like lights on a tree. Then the morning finally comes, and we celebrate. The paper is torn, and the presents lose their newness with the same quick depreciation of a car driven off the lot. And even though I do my best to focus my heart on Christ’s birth, my emotions still find a drop off like that the presents left behind. We’ve just celebrated the birth of our Savior, spent an entire month in anticipation of that day. We sing songs, light advent candles, and focus our hearts and minds on the gift of a baby who changed the world. But then it’s over; the gift is given. What now?

I wonder if the shepherds felt the same way I do. Angels came to them and proclaimed the birth of their Savior. I imagine the awe that night, of quaking in the presence of angels and basking in the presence of God. And then the night was over; Mary needed to feed her son, sheep needed tending, and life needed to go on.

That night was fanfare and excitement, and then the drop-off, waiting for the Savior to grow, to become the man who would save us from our sins. The waiting didn’t negate that momentous, divine night, but I wonder if it made the shepherds question, if the waiting created room for doubt or if they were the type of people to wait with hope.

I’m not so great at this waiting stuff. This part where I know that God has a good and great and wonderful and beautiful plan for my life, but right now, I’m in the middle, doing the small things in preparation for the big things. Like Mary, dutifully and lovingly raising a son who would be a savior. I think of her in those in-between years, changing diapers (or whatever they used back then), washing clothes, cooking meals, raising children. She knew Jesus was the Son of God, that he would bring a kingdom without end, and yet she waited to see it and, in the meantime, went about all the mundane parts of her life. When she finally saw her son fulfill the promise the angel had given her decades earlier, it was as she witnessed his death on a cross.

Why God? Why this way? Why did you promise something that you knew would crush me? Couldn’t this be accomplished any other way? I imagine her anguish; I know a teeny tiny portion of her pain of unmet expectations. To wait, to question, to doubt. Those aspects are as much a part of my faith as the miraculous, the hopeful, and the assurance.

As I clean up the messes, say goodbye to pumpkin pie for the next ten months, and slowly take down my decorations, I move back into the season of waiting. I’ve seen my Savior, celebrated his birth, and now I wait. I poise myself in the in-between and faithfully attend to the small things with faith that even when God defies my expectations, his plan is still best. Because when I look at the manger and turn my eyes to the cross, I see a love story written for me.

“And the soul felt its worth”