By Todd E. Brady
Vice President for University Ministries, Union University, Jackson
“Happy Thanksgiving!” “Merry Christmas!” “Happy New Year!” This is the time of year when everyone is encouraging others to be happy. But for those who have lost a loved one, there is a sadness that no amount of encouragement can overcome. For these folks, holidays seem like something to survive, not enjoy.
For some, all the songs, gatherings and blinking lights of Christmas are eclipsed by an ever-present, suffocating grief. Moments of happiness quickly evaporate when an empty chair serves as an ongoing reminder that a loved one is no longer present. Everywhere we turn, we are reminded that things will never be the same again. For many, this month is a difficult season of reflecting on past Christmases instead of enjoying the present Christmas.
While many houses are filled with twinkling lights, those who have lost loved ones over the last year find themselves living in a house with depressing hues of blue. Everyone else seems to be chipper and singing in major chords, but those grieving sing slow and sad songs in minor chords. As Elvis Presley used to sing, it’s a “blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, Christmas.”
When a loved one has died, it now feels like we are living in a house of grief. There’s sadness in the carpet, sadness in the curtains and sadness in the air. Sadness everywhere. You can’t get away from it.
That bathroom vanity reminds us of the man who once stood there and shaved. Seeing the empty place at the table where he used to sit is a painful reminder of the life that used to be. We wake up from a night’s sleep and are reminded again of the one who is gone.
Grief comes on us all, but Christians grieve differently than others. The loss is ever present. The pain never subsides. However, the Christian’s grief is not hopeless. On the contrary, we grieve with hope.
It’s called hopeful grieving.
Sure, even the Christian sometimes feels that she is living in a house of grief, but she realizes that her house of grief sits on a foundation of hope. “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
At Christmas, we remember those who have gone, but at the same time we rest in the One who has come.
By God’s grace and through faith in Christ, Christians do not suffer the defeat of death. Death affects us, but death does not defeat us.
Death does not defeat us because we know that death is not final. Christ defeated death. As the old theologian John Owen said, we have experienced “the death of death in the death of Christ.”
The Christ who was sent into this world as an infant and who died as our substitute will one day return to consummate His kingdom. Then, “he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4).
On this side of glory, Christmas indeed may be blue. This season might be one of grief, but in Christ it is a grief laced with hope, for we know that “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord” (I Thessalonians 4:170. B&R