Waiting in eager anticipation. Life struggles to be born. Love is coming. Light.
Waiting in a shaft of light, surrounded by darkness. Death has visited. The aching loss of life departed, the threat of emptiness.
I cannot help but be drawn to Advent. Birth. New life. The coming, the anticipation, the excitement.
New birth is neither easy nor painless. Labour births life. Labour births love through work, pain, and the giving up of yourself.
I am drawn to His labour of love, written across time and space. Beauty I cannot comprehend. Infinite and vast He calls to me. Into my emptiness, He comes.
The Word that spoke the stars to shine, come to dwell among us. Birthed into the world He created, confined by the flesh He fashioned.
Born to die, He birthed the end of death.
For that is really how it is. Birth and death walk hand in hand. Newness of life, wrapped tight, rocked, against the whispers of death. The King, born bringing the light, chased by darkness. For though the light has come and the darkness cannot overcome it, for now, the darkness is not banished completely.
So we walk in the light of the second advent, our shield against the darkness. This true light that calls us to be birthed as children of God, wraps us in grace. He rocks us with whispers of life, knowing His labour of love which led to death, shelters us from the sting of death. Not the pain of it, but the sting.
For, wrapped in His grace and life, when the darkness of death comes, we will see heaven opened and our ladder from the land of darkness into the land of light, will be the very Word Himself. His labour of love will birth us anew.
And this time, death will not take birth by the hand. Death will be banished forever. And we will see His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth!
*This was written on December 23, 2013, the day my niece, Aleah was born. She shares a birthday with a friend, dear Carmen, who now celebrates in heaven. Birth, death, new life.
Below is my favorite Christmas song. I watch it with my children and see tears stream down their cheeks as they see the price of life was death.
A Space for Grace 