For All Who Face Trampled Days This Christmas

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For All who Face Trampled Days This Christmas

Six inches of new snow fell the day before and during the night, blanketing the forest floor with flakes of diamonds. The pine boughs dipped under the weight of it. Even the old grandmother juniper tree bowed lower with the first substantial snowfall of the season.

"Let's go look for animal tracks," I said to my husband, grabbing a hat and mittens as I looked out the picture window.

"Can we wait at least until the sun has risen?" Kevin poured a scoop of coffee beans into a filter. "It's not even 7 a.m."

Glancing at the clock, I realized the truth of his statement, but I couldn't remember the last time I had woken up to an unspoiled layer of winter. I wanted to be the first to make my mark in the whiteness.

When the kids were younger, we would pick them up from school and drive two hours or more to virgin snow where they had snowball fights, made snow angels and, when possible, collected enough snow to create a miniature snowman. We had sipped hot cocoa elixir to warm away the chill, before we loaded everyone up again and returned to the routine of desert city life.

I felt the same anticipation today as I watched the fog rise over a distant, frozen expanse of Mormon Lake as a pair of stellar jays scolded with a shook shook shook at the empty bird feeder.  We donned our coats and headed outside.

The chipmunk and mouse tracks were easy to identify, but we puzzled at a lone set of tracks leading down to the cliff edge. A print frozen near a slushy puddle like an ice-encrusted fossil identified the interloper -- a fox. We had seen a pair in the area in the fall.

Mollie, our rust-colored mutt, sniffed at the unfamiliar scents and filled her face with snow crystals, while we laughed at her antics, but I did not laugh when she trounced through the underbrush while I tried to capture a photo of rabbit tracks in the snow.

Her footprints marred the shot.

Unspoiled potential. Unmarked whiteness.

I desire that for my Christmas season. I want that for friends facing an uncertain advent of damaged relationships, challenging diagnoses, and piles of unpaid bills. I want that. I dream of that. Don't you?

Yet, as Kevin and I walked in the unmarked snow, I knew of friends facing a trampled landscape of unwanted footprints of all that was not perfect or hopeful.

My heart grieved.

I found myself uttering their names in prayer to my God who once came as a baby into the middle of a messy, nonperfect world, who entered humanity to become like one of us, who was named Emmanuel.

God with us. With us.

Not distant. Not unknowable. Not unreachable.

As Jennifer Kennedy Dean wrote in Pursuing the Christ, "Does it mean with me like someone next to me? No, nearer than that. Does it mean with me like someone holding me in tight embrace? No, nearer than that....With me like the beat of my heart? No, nearer, nearer. With me, becomes in me."

In me when I say yes to His invitation.

In me, the hope of glory. (Galatians 2:20)

This. This. I believe.

This Hope I carry closer than my own skin for all the trampled days ahead.

For me. For those I love.

For friends in hard places. God with us. Emmanuel.