The Loudest Shout of Christmas

"I wanted it

to shout 

Christmas

 no matter where you looked," she said, as we entered their one-bedroom apartment, placing our coats and purses by the front door.

I gazed around the room.

I heard

the shout of Christmas

from a tree squeezed between a shelf and their front door, a tree she found in the alley by the dumpster, now decorated with lights and ornaments.

I heard

the shout of Christmas

 from a second white tree on a small table in the kitchen and in a strand of six-inch stars twinkling on the ceiling, separating the two rooms.

I heard the shout of Christmas from the two manger scenes and from the homemade garland of felt circles in green, red and gray.

I heard the shout of Christmas from her childhood penguin collection hanging out on the bookshelves next to tomes of Beowulf and Homer in the original languages and The Complete Works of Shakespeare and The Chronicles of Narnia, and I heard the shouts from the stuffed penguins on the highest shelves, placed there so Lewis the cat wouldn't hunt them and present their slaughtered black and white bodies on the carpeting by the bedroom door.

I heard the shout of Christmas as we were served mugs of hot beverages and ate handfuls of gluten-free, chocolate Chex mix.

"I put photos in all the frames on the walls," she said.

She said it quiet and matter-of-fact, but I knew the unspoken story in that statement.

For nine months those frames have remained empty, nailed to the wall, but blank, like nobody was home.

Empty frames might not seem significant for some people, but this was the girl who surrounded herself with smiling photos in her growing-up bedroom and who was always snapping pictures, and who has had framed work displayed in the halls of Arizona State University. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a collection of face-less rectangles told me more than anything of the journey she had walked the past nine months, battling unrelenting fatigue and chronic illness,

and pain,

and is-this-the-way-my-life-will-always-be despair.

So when I looked at the now-filled-framed memories that adorned the white apartment walls, I saw more than photos of a wedding, an engagement and a honeymoon.

I saw the relief of a diagnosis, because to have a name, even when it is difficult, is better than no name at all.

I saw the answered prayers of a hundred sleepless nights for a doctor that didn't believe it was all in her head, and medication that means she might have some relief,

and there in the framed-hope smiling back at me,

I heard the loudest shout of Christmas of all.

Note: This story was written back when I knew nothing about daily, chronic pain in someone you love. Three years later, this continues to be our daughter's reality. As a mom, watching the living out of her story, I continue to look for shouts of Christmas. And there are days, to be perfectly honest, I would be content with only a whisper.

Today, on your own journey of faith,

in your framed-in realities,

I pray you hear the shout of Christmas,

or the whisper of Emmanuel,

God with us.