Ghosts of Christmas past

So, Christmas has come and gone once again. Celebrating it for the 27th time, I still feel there is much more mileage to get out of the richness of the occasion. Each year now feels to be just beginning to scratch the surface. This year has been such an unexpected and profound journey of both personal reflection and simultaneous outward projection of what Jesus means to me.

I still find it difficult to separate the past from the present though.

Over the years I have grown into a richer and fuller understanding of God's amazing breadth and depth of love through Jesus. Particularly at this time of the year though, I still find myself struggling to separate the hope of things to come from the pain of previous loss.

Honestly as much as I love Christmas, I have realized the last few years that I get slightly uneasy around this time of year. The big picture stuff is all in place for me. I fully get the gravity of this season. An all powerful being who made everything we can see, touch, smell, feel, etc., deciding to come and be "WITH US" is truly the most exceptional thing that has ever happened since we were formed out of some dirt (guys) and human bone (girls) way back when, when all THIS came into being. Beyond that broad stroked appreciation, sifting through Christmas on a very ME level has very mixed emotions.

I became more aware of the WHY last Thanksgiving. I spent it with my sister Rebecca and her beautiful family in Florida. We began talking about how at a very young age nearly ever year I would have these random health episodes on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. A couple times I had critical asthma attacks that would land me in the emergency room. Another year I got the flu so bad that my family, being completely overwhelmed by the amount of vomit being emitted from my tiny body, accidentally overdosed me on suppositories! If you don't know what a suppository is, I'll spare you the details. The overdose led to me having a severe allergic reaction to the drugs within, sending my minuscule little 5 or 6 year old body into random spasms, and my neck would crink over to the side semi-permanently on and off for hours at a time. This naturally led to me and my family spending the "funnest" day of the year in the emergency room again.

You might think it was all a case of bad luck. Why Christmas over and over again? What a coincidence!

Right?

My sister and I started talking about this and came to a more concise conclusion than mere chance. You see, the Christmas before all this started happening a much more traumatic and catastrophic thing happened to me and my family. My parents, who had been fighting and barely hanging on to their marriage, decided to separate a few weeks before Christmas. My Mom took me and my sisters to my grandparents in California last minute where we spent our first Christmas without Dad. This obviously would have been sad and dramatic at the time, but I was too young to really soak in what was really happening. I'm sure for the rest of the family it was a terribly difficult time.

I actually remember it being really fun spending Christmas in the cold for the first time. I remember laughing,singing and dancing with my cousins who I didn't know well but was able to grow in love with them over that Christmas. I remember putting popcorn on a string and putting it around the massive Christmas tree my grandparents had in their giant living room. There was no way we could do this in Hawaii due to ants and cockroaches. I was amazed that such commonplace critters "go away" in the winter in other parts of the world. I remember my Uncle got my cousins a train set and a R/C car track. I was so jealous, but managed to get a few turns in on the R/C track. I remember my sisters and cousins put together a talent night of sorts, which consisted mostly of them lip syncing and dancing horribly to Paula Abdul (those songs are burned in my memory decades later, and I don't even like Paula Abdul). I'm pretty sure video footage of said talent night exists somewhere out in the vast galaxy of cardboard boxed Lujan memorabilia.

As I sat and reflected with my sister last Thanksgiving I realized this was and is my first cognitive Christmas memory. The year before our family took a trip to Washington and Whistler around Christmas time, and I only have a few snapshots of memories from that trip. One is being in snow for the first time in my life (to this day I have only been in snow maybe one or two other times). The other clear memory is being pushed down a massive flight of frozen stairs by my very caring and attentive sisters and smashing face first into a car bumper at the bottom of the hill. I remember coming to consciousness a few moments later and my dad carrying me through the snow back to our cabin and telling me I was going to be ok.

But these memories are without any clear, classic Christmas imagery. No going through our stockings Christmas Eve, no gathering around the tree and opening presents Christmas morning, no carols, no hot chocolate, no decorating the tree, none of that kind of stuff.

That all came the next year, minus one incredibly important detail...

DAD!

My first cognitive Christmas memories are all great and warm and fun, but they are missing arguably the most important piece of the puzzle. I didn't know it at the time, and didn't really put that piece together until last Thanksgiving, but as much as those memories with my grandparents and my cousins were amazing, I think deep down I knew something was drastically wrong. My sister shared that knowing now the full trauma and disconnect that occurred over my parents divorce, the cause of all those physical reactions at Christmas time were directly related to the deep psychological and spiritual trauma I experienced when Mom and Dad split up that fateful Christmas in the late 1980s. My little boy body was trying to catch up with the pain that was occurring under the surface.

I found myself in that moment realizing, as we discussed quite lightheartedly and cavalier the actual heartbreaking reality of my childhood, that she was absolutely right and that my current tension and struggle with Christmas in the present are completely intertwined with those haunting memories. I am finding myself also more and more compelled to understand that I, like everyone else on this planet, have a responsibility to make a choice to either allow these things to be reconciled or to allow them to brew and boil year in year out and live out of that reality.

Sometimes it feels that there is no other reality to live out of. "It's all I've ever known" we tell ourselves.

But... as a believer in the real story of Christmas I need to take a sobering approach to such viewpoints. As much as I have allowed this Jesus to change my life and the way I view the world around me, I also still need to allow him to impact my past and where i've come from. Remembering that God came to be WITH ME when I was thirteen and desperately needed to know the love of a father, It seems so logical NOW, so elementary. It changed me then and it continues to change me now.

The thing is, it doesn't erase what occurred THEN. Those memories are still real and the pain and trauma attached didn't go away just because I prayed a prayer in an old kim chee factory almost 15 years ago in Kalihi Valley. I knew that God cared then, that he wasn't removed or unaffected by my pain. I found him to be someone who spoke clearly into the deepest parts of my soul, and that he cried and grieved those awful moments of my early childhood.

It feels like the only natural response we can do when we have these encounters with the Emmanuel God is to just toss up all this hurt to him and hope that we never need to revisit them again. Those moments when he shares with us that he was there in the midst of all our hurt and pain feels like a giant release valve that we hopefully never have to release again. We like to believe that a spiritual sort of memory wipe occurs.

I'm not quite sure this is what God has in mind though. He isn't the kind of God who wants to completely remove me from my past. As much as he hates that certain things have happened to me, he is BIG enough and WITH ME enough NOW to redeem all of that into a beautiful story that reeks of his faithfulness and healing power. Not a healing power that requires a spiritual and emotional lobotomy, but one that is fierce and wild enough to stand with and hold you while you wail, kick and scream about the deepest and darkest corners of your past. To me, this is the Christmas story at it most raw and vulnerable.

"Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt it's worth."

This is why Christmas really should be the most wonderful time of the year. All the things we do, which some Christians would say are pagan, can be redeemed FULLY to scream and shout this amazing truth.

Let the lights be bright, let the trees be glitzy, let the tinsel shine, let the stockings bulge, let the turkeys glisten, let boxes under the tree overflow, let carols be sung sweetly... let this all happen and more if they are done in such a way as to remind what God proved to us all those centuries ago.

Let it impact us NOW, and let it impact us for the THEN, for the things we wish never happened.

The choice I make now won't be made for me. I can pretend the symbolism around me this season points to the truth of who God is. To pretend that I live in a way that says I am whole and I am found.

Or I can choose to allow God to dig deep into who I am NOW through my past, present and into my future, radically shaping and forming me through things I want so badly to have never occurred. Through this God shows me that he is still true, that I can still know that this is the truth of who I am NOW even though sometimes it doesn't always feel that way.

This year I broke out of a funk that I have tried to break out of many times. I decided not to let my own expectations of what I wish happened THEN to affect the way I loved others around me NOW.

Gift giving is something that my family wasn't terrible at, but we weren't really great at either. My mom would make a massive effort every year to give us as much gifts as possible, but it was always a stretch to say the least. The last few years I would sit and hope that others would come and rescue Christmas for me. This year, with a help of a few friends, I broke out of that and decided to take on the reality of what God modeled for me through Christmas:

To give out of a sense of love and sacrifice and not out of obligation or guilt.

What a privilege it is to live life out of that reality!

We have these types of choices to make all the time, to live out of the old reality or the new reality. Christmas is a great, exaggerated season that confronts whether we believe and live out of the reality that God came to BE WITH US.

I gave out more presents this year than I ever have. I spent an exponentially greater time than ever before crafting and laboring sentiments to tell others that I'm grateful for them in my life. I also received gifts as well. One in particular that really deserves more gratitude.It's not a gift that you open up, freak out and jump up and down in screaming Jubilation over. It should be more like that, and if you're anything like me it doesn't always get expressed that way. Sure, it has its brief expressions of over the top appreciation and happiness, but deep down I know that it deserves more.

This Christmas I am pleased to say that the greatest gift I've received is learning how to appreciate more the one I've already received. It's the gift that keeps on giving, it's the gift that makes me scream in joy and the one that walks me through dark sorrow.

JESUS, the God who is WITH.