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| My sister, experiencing the goal of all those late nights |
Grad school had its share of
professional and personal crises, like the night when my drunken
apartment neighbor ripped the building door off its hinges and aimed his fist at my face, to the
time I discovered a missing minus sign in an important derivation,
invalidating my current research and taking my work off in a totally
different direction. For all that, the dark times during college were
deeper and much longer. My junior year, when the full force of
coursework really hit, was boot camp, and the massive curriculum was
like a drill sergeant trying to break me. I had always dreamed of
being a physicist, and that dream hung in the balance as I climbed
mountains of work and slept very little, wondering if I would make it
through.
I was at a college in a small town in
rural Ohio, without a car, and the brightest times that year, in fact
the whole four years, were the visits. I can remember one clearly,
when my brother drove up for the weekend to collect me for a holiday.
Just having someone there from the outside put everything into
perspective and made me realize that whatever happened, I would
survive. That visit was a light in a very dark place. I remember also
visiting my sister a year or two later, at another small Midwestern
college. It was the end of the year, and all her friends had left,
yet she still had a big project to finish, and I knew the look in her
eyes, like a tired swimmer a mile out from shore. We put on some good music, and squared up against the pile
of books and papers and at the end drove away with a
sense of emancipation.
Letters, calls, care packages—these
are all important. But there’s no substitute for being there in the
flesh.
I have never felt this more deeply than
as a parent not being present
when my boys were in tough spots. Last year Sam transitioned to
public school. He was the youngest in a class of strangers, with a
teacher who had the warmth of a stone. He learned a lot
that year, but many were the days when he pleaded not to have to go
to school. What I would have given to have been there with him!
I have
never resonated with Christmas, maybe because Jesus as a baby has always seemed so foreign to me. This year it’s finally sunken in what God
was doing. God knows there’s no substitute for being present in the
flesh. Like any parent, God’s heart ached to be with
his people in all their struggles, in a way that a pillar of flame simply can't be. And so God implemented a plan so
strange that Paul refers to it as a “mystery” which he says "has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints," a mystery which amazingly neither his
people nor even the angels in all their wisdom nor the demons in all their cunning anticipated.
No
road, no journey across the furthest seas, could take God to his
children the way he wanted. The only way to traverse the gap was to actually allow
himself to be born as a child among us, to learn to speak and move
anew, and to grow up among the people his heart ached for. (Next time
you have to wait in a packed, smelly airport for a delayed flight, be
glad your journey doesn’t involve a birth canal!) And God did this
even knowing that many of the people he was so eagerly wanting to be
with wouldn’t recognize him: "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?"
We who
do recognize what God
did to be with us, have a great reason to cheer this Christmas. If
you are a sibling who has taken time to visit a brother or sister in
a dark place; if you are a parent who has longed to be with your
scared or lonely child, then you understand. Emmanuel:
God with us.
