A Flyleaf Christmas
"I've been looking in your window.
I've been dressing in your clothes.
I've been walking dead, watching you, long enough to I can't go on."
- Flyleaf, "This Close"
It's that time of year again. Stores are crammed with shoppers, whole radio stations appear on the internet playing versions of just two songs, and the McCathern family listens to entirely too much "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "The Messiah" (yes, we have others, but that's what we tend to get stuck on around here.) Usually right after Thanksgiving I'm chomping at the bit to post something on the blog about what I'm thinking about regarding Christmas, as if everybody in our lives who really want more Micah and Asher pictures want to hear me dwell on whatever tangent my brain is taking this year. (Just nod and smile... nod and smile.)
This year has been different. California isn't working out the way I'd hoped. It's not bad exactly, just not great. Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe the kids are getting old enough that the move was too hard for them. Maybe Sharon expressed it best in my new favorite-line-to-quote-out-of-context: "Traffic is the other shoe." But for whatever reason, this time of reflecting on the awesome wonder of the Incarnation has just not been all it has been in the past. I find myself shocked Christmas is less than a week away. I start to wonder if Lucy is right, and it's run by some big eastern syndicate.
All of which makes me feel disconnected from my favorite time of year.
This week has been extra bad, and today has been the crowning touch of bad on top of that (I won't get in to details because they get in to work that I don't want to talk about publicly.) So I've been feeling pretty down most of the day. And when I'm down, I listen to Flyleaf.
If you haven't heard of Flyleaf, bear with me for a bit. They are, as our friend Trilisa likes to call the genre, "angry boy music." I don't expect you to read this and go buy their music (unlike Out of the Grey, which you should do right now) because it's not everybody's thing. But today God used Flyleaf to teach me about myself, and all of us, and Christmas.
The song I excerpted at the beginning is called "This Close". It's about someone recognizing the God-shaped hole in their life:
I had a dream that we were dead, but we pretended that we still lived.
With no regrets we never bled, and we took everything live could give and came up broken empty-handed in the end.
I don't know who I am anymore.
Not once in life have I been real, but I've never been this close before.
I've been looking in your window.
I've been dressing in your clothes.
I've been walking dead, watching you, long enough to know I can't go on.
I finally was able to put words to the way I've been feeling about this move after hearing this song earlier today: I feel lost. I'm not lost (at least, not in the Baptist sense...) I know Christ. I know why I'm on this earth. I don't know why I'm here in Southern California, but I don't think it's always ours to understand all the motivations of the divine. This is not about knowing: it's about feeling. I feel like I don't know who I am: here I am doing the thing I've been telling myself I wanted to do since I was a little kid, and... it's not who I am. I feel separated. Disconnected. Lonely. Apart. Forsaken.
Obviously that's overstating things: I love my family, and they have been great here. Part of the reason I feel this way is because I feel detached from them with the commute and the hours and so on. But the reason I was having trouble connecting to Christmas is because I feel lost.
And Christmas, in addition to all of the other things I've said before, is about being found.
We follow these events around like hungry sparrows or the rats in the piper's tale. We try them on: outward trappings of a life of being known that should have been but never was. Looking in windows. Dressing in clothes. Walking dead, watching life.
Our God did not leave us like this. He did not abandon us after our rebellion, watching us with contempt for our attempts. Instead, in his compassion, He knew us: looked in our window. He dressed himself in our clothes. Walking dead (in the marked-for sense) He came to find us.
And there we were: an impossibly young mother unsure of how to care for this wriggling tangle of limbs. A grown man nervous about a son not fully his. We were sweaty and smelled of sheep. We were humbled by events we didn't understand despite our great learning. We were thankful our time had past, as we were old and tired. We told others how our half-mad ramblings had finally come to fruition in this child. We marveled at His early understanding (with authority) of spiritual matters. Broken, blind, full of hate, mocking, swearing, lying, stealing, killing, savage beings groping for everything life could give. And at the end we were broken and empty-handed.
So He gave us our secret desire. He showed us He knew us by becoming one of us. He became real for us, so that we might become truly real.
I've been dressing in your clothes.
I've been walking dead, watching you, long enough to I can't go on."
- Flyleaf, "This Close"
It's that time of year again. Stores are crammed with shoppers, whole radio stations appear on the internet playing versions of just two songs, and the McCathern family listens to entirely too much "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "The Messiah" (yes, we have others, but that's what we tend to get stuck on around here.) Usually right after Thanksgiving I'm chomping at the bit to post something on the blog about what I'm thinking about regarding Christmas, as if everybody in our lives who really want more Micah and Asher pictures want to hear me dwell on whatever tangent my brain is taking this year. (Just nod and smile... nod and smile.)
This year has been different. California isn't working out the way I'd hoped. It's not bad exactly, just not great. Maybe my expectations were too high, or maybe the kids are getting old enough that the move was too hard for them. Maybe Sharon expressed it best in my new favorite-line-to-quote-out-of-context: "Traffic is the other shoe." But for whatever reason, this time of reflecting on the awesome wonder of the Incarnation has just not been all it has been in the past. I find myself shocked Christmas is less than a week away. I start to wonder if Lucy is right, and it's run by some big eastern syndicate.
All of which makes me feel disconnected from my favorite time of year.
This week has been extra bad, and today has been the crowning touch of bad on top of that (I won't get in to details because they get in to work that I don't want to talk about publicly.) So I've been feeling pretty down most of the day. And when I'm down, I listen to Flyleaf.
If you haven't heard of Flyleaf, bear with me for a bit. They are, as our friend Trilisa likes to call the genre, "angry boy music." I don't expect you to read this and go buy their music (unlike Out of the Grey, which you should do right now) because it's not everybody's thing. But today God used Flyleaf to teach me about myself, and all of us, and Christmas.
The song I excerpted at the beginning is called "This Close". It's about someone recognizing the God-shaped hole in their life:
I had a dream that we were dead, but we pretended that we still lived.
With no regrets we never bled, and we took everything live could give and came up broken empty-handed in the end.
I don't know who I am anymore.
Not once in life have I been real, but I've never been this close before.
I've been looking in your window.
I've been dressing in your clothes.
I've been walking dead, watching you, long enough to know I can't go on.
I finally was able to put words to the way I've been feeling about this move after hearing this song earlier today: I feel lost. I'm not lost (at least, not in the Baptist sense...) I know Christ. I know why I'm on this earth. I don't know why I'm here in Southern California, but I don't think it's always ours to understand all the motivations of the divine. This is not about knowing: it's about feeling. I feel like I don't know who I am: here I am doing the thing I've been telling myself I wanted to do since I was a little kid, and... it's not who I am. I feel separated. Disconnected. Lonely. Apart. Forsaken.
Obviously that's overstating things: I love my family, and they have been great here. Part of the reason I feel this way is because I feel detached from them with the commute and the hours and so on. But the reason I was having trouble connecting to Christmas is because I feel lost.
And Christmas, in addition to all of the other things I've said before, is about being found.
"I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already. And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins."Ultimately being human in this world means being lost. Not once in our lives have we been real, and in the dissonance we experience with the world around us we come to know that. But sometimes we get close to real. So achingly close. We peer over the sill of the store window at the long hoped for present, longing for someone to know our secret desire and get it for us. We sit on our hands as we await the arrival of our loved one driving in to meet our family. We feel too tiny arms try to wrap around our inexorably expanding waistlines.
-- Hebrews 8:10-12
We follow these events around like hungry sparrows or the rats in the piper's tale. We try them on: outward trappings of a life of being known that should have been but never was. Looking in windows. Dressing in clothes. Walking dead, watching life.
Our God did not leave us like this. He did not abandon us after our rebellion, watching us with contempt for our attempts. Instead, in his compassion, He knew us: looked in our window. He dressed himself in our clothes. Walking dead (in the marked-for sense) He came to find us.
And there we were: an impossibly young mother unsure of how to care for this wriggling tangle of limbs. A grown man nervous about a son not fully his. We were sweaty and smelled of sheep. We were humbled by events we didn't understand despite our great learning. We were thankful our time had past, as we were old and tired. We told others how our half-mad ramblings had finally come to fruition in this child. We marveled at His early understanding (with authority) of spiritual matters. Broken, blind, full of hate, mocking, swearing, lying, stealing, killing, savage beings groping for everything life could give. And at the end we were broken and empty-handed.
So He gave us our secret desire. He showed us He knew us by becoming one of us. He became real for us, so that we might become truly real.
"Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others — the armies of heaven — praising God and saying:Let’s see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.
'Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.'"
-- Luke 2:13-14
