where waves grow sweet

We have been in holiday mode for a while now… enjoying a couple-day visit from our daughter and a couple-week visit from my mother-in-law, playing with Chase who had a chunk of time off school, sleeping late, celebrating a Thanksgiving feast with a favorite cousin and extended family, buying and decorating a Christmas tree, and watching a mind-numbing amount of Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, which I just recently realized we had (aren’t you grateful for this discovery, John?!).

But today is quiet. John is at work. Chase is at school. Our guests are now gone. I am resting in the embrace of my enormous sofa with my computer on my lap and the Christmas tree lights twinkling by my side, listening to the rain come down. 

I have been missing Cole. After he left for the Navy, it wasn’t a given that he would come home for the holidays so last Christmas without him didn’t seem strange. But it’s been a long pause since his last visit. The rhythm we’d established tells my heart he should be coming home soon. I can’t help picturing it; what our time together would look like. I keep imagining him walking with me around the block of this new neighborhood he hasn’t yet seen. It would be so natural and right; so unserious and yet deeply relational. He wasn’t one for big planned events, so connection with him always happened that way… organically; quietly. There would be bike rides around the neighborhood, late nights watching Bob’s Burgers as he teased me about being like Linda (“Did someone say sailing??”), light-hearted conversation in the kitchen while I cooked, Legos with his brother, inside jokes with his sister, indulgent restaurant dinners John would treat us to after we’d all wandered around the Spectrum laughing because there was always laughter when Cole was around, getting to see my favorite sight on earth – all three of my kids together. 

It doesn’t seem far-fetched that he would show up on our doorstep. That we could pick up where we left off and carry on. There will be a time for that. We will all be together again and it will be so worth the wait, with laughter and connection sweeter and richer than anything we’ve yet known. Yes, there will be a time when everything has been made right; our every mistake covered by the power of love. All the darkness we’ve experienced will flee in the presence of astounding light. The pain we’ve known so acutely won’t even be a memory because it will be overtaken by the purest and most perfect joy. 

Thank you, Jesus, for choosing to come to this broken world for us, knowing how desperately we needed you. Help us to grasp and carry the profound truth of your birth in every cell of our being; that we could sing of your goodness, not just this season but forevermore.