The Christmas Promise

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Preface

A fresh blanket of snow fell last night.  Sparkling white mounds sit on top of the shrubs outside my kitchen window.  I fall into a chair at the table and pour cream into my coffee.  My friend Jack is working on a car in my driveway; I can see his breath in the air.  I haven’t known Jack long, only a year.  “The Year of Wonders,” I call it.  I’m still trying to piece the year together but I don’t think I ever will.  Maybe I’m not supposed to; that’s the beauty of the mystery.

When I was a young mother I loved to see the Christmas season begin.  The day after Thanksgiving I’d put in my favorite cassette of songs with Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and Burl Ives and the sounds of Christmas would fill our home as I hauled down the wooden Nativity set from the attic along with a battered fake tree.  My children and husband and I would decorate it and by the time we were finished it was always icicle heavy and bulb poor but we took pictures as if the tree were standing on the White House lawn.

One winter, my youngest son, Matthew pressed his nose to the living room window and watched snowfall, covering our lawn.  “Now it’s Christmas,” he had said.

"Snow doesn't make Christmas," I had said.  "There are a lot of states and countries that never see a flake of snow.  It's the promise of Christmas that makes Christmas what it is."

Matthew watched the snow cover the grass outside the living room window and pressed his nose to the glass.  "Promise of what?"

I sat on the floor next to him.  "Well, it's the promise of love and grace.  Grace was given to us at Christmas.  That's the biggest promise of all.”

My husband Walt thought it would be an adventure if the family trekked out to cut our own tree that year.  We bundled up the kids and drove to a friend’s farm where Walt led us through what felt like miles of pastureland before we arrived at a small thicket of woods.  My son Daniel spotted the perfect tree and Walt whacked at the bottom branches so he could get a clear shot at the trunk.  Walt hadn’t thought about sharpening the ax before we left that morning and after several whacks he was tired and leaning up against a tree to catch his breath.  Each of our children attempted to carve away at the tree but of course they were all too small to do much damage.  Walt was angry with himself for not sharpening the ax and though I tried to stifle my laughs I couldn’t.  He got down on his belly and was whittling away at the trunk as if with a pocket knife and I laughed harder as the pine needles poked and jabbed at his face.  He kicked at the trunk several times, bouncing off the branches and landing on the ground.  The kids began to squeal watching him and soon they were running around the tree giggling and kicking at it.  Walt whacked, whittled and lashed out at that tree until it finally surrendered and we laughed all the way back over the pastureland to the car. 

For seven years of my life I dreaded to see Christmas come.  I had lost my husband and youngest son within two weeks of each other and those sweet memories with my family proved to be too painful to remember but devastating to forget. 

It’s a terrifying thing to give your heart to that small band of people around you, knowing that relationships can be messy and that someday your heart will broken and you’ll come undone.  That’s the riskiest part of this human journey.  In the past year, I think I’ve finally learned that there are some things that God doesn’t want us to forget so he allows us to go back to those memories, not daily, but on occasion, and remember.  It’s in those moments we discover that somehow, someway, God entwines both remembering and forgetting and shapes them into beauty, something that actually makes sense of the mess in our lives.  I still have a hard time understanding that kind of grace and although there are days when I feel unworthy to accept it, I do.  If I didn’t I’d go crazy.  We all would.

This story is about a lot of people; I've just been designated to tell it.  There are days when I look back on the last year and think, how did it all come together?  Then there are days when I wonder why it all couldn’t have happened sooner.  But it's everyday that I know that in spite of us grace will prevail.  That's the promise of Christmas.

Book Description

Gloria endured a tragedy that almost shook her faith entirely.  Each Christmas, she places a card in an envelope on her tree, restating a promise she made to her husband before he died.

Chaz has a good job as head of security at Wilson’s Department Store, but each night he returns home to an empty house.  He longs for a wife and family of his own but realizes that the life choices he’s made have alienated him.  He befriends a young boy whose mother has fallen on hard times, giving him a chance to have a life he thought impossible.

Miriam is a constantly critical, disapproving neighbor who looks with suspicion at all the good things Gloria tries to do.  When a twist of fate makes them roommates instead of neighbors, it’s the ultimate test of patience and faith.

In The Christmas Promise, the lives of these characters collide and we learn that, even as we move ahead, the past is never far behind.  In this warmly humorous and deeply poignant, retelling of the story of the prodigal son, we are reminded that The Christmas Promise is the promise of second chances.

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