A bitter cold dried my throat and forced its way into my lungs as I pumped gas. The once-full tank had been burned up in ceaseless trips to the hospital. Across the street, as if to my comfort and mine alone, an unnamed clergyman struck bells that would mend my heart. “The First Noel” reverberated from the local United Methodist Church.
Five days prior, on December 20th, tears had wet my cheeks, warm for an instant but cooling as they seeped from my eyelids. They fell onto a hospital bed. My mother was still asleep, unconscious from a synthetic knockout that had allowed the doctors to perform a high-risk surgery in hopes of removing the mango-sized tumor from her abdomen.
My family and I had spent what seemed simultaneously like years and a single moment waiting, praying, playing card games, and reading in the waiting room. The seven-hour surgery was meant to remove much of the stage four ovarian cancer that had metastasized to my mother’s abdomen and several other areas. We heard from the doctors that the surgery was a success with little complication. I wrestled then, as I do now, with allowing myself a sense of gratefulness and joy at those monumental successes that felt so ineffective against a relentlessly doomed prognosis. I had cried at the sight of my mother — weak, worn, without hair on her head or awareness that her family surrounded her. I cried over the known and the unknown. I knew we’d be in the hospital for Christmas; knew the toll this surgery and recovery would take; knew that God was good. I didn’t know how long my mother would live; how grieved I would be to contemplate the state of the disease and its eventual fruition; how God would show us that he was good.
In retrospect, God has sent a thousand little graces like doves to remind me that though this sickness leads to death, the One who ever lives and never sleeps is the God of Life who will provide for our needs. The most formative reminder occurred when I heard the bells on Christmas Day.
God cares about the little reminders. I’ve always loved that song, and now I’ve lived it. (From my journal, Christmas Day, 2024)
Every few years, a prominent religious writer recalls and recontextualizes the history of an evergreen poem-turned-hymn. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells,” which became the popular song “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” has been called a “carol for the despairing” in Christianity Today, and in TIME, a “Christmas hymn for our troubled time.” Both of these entries discuss Longfellow’s work as a balm for our personal wrestling with global ails.
I’ve long enjoyed the song and find Longfellow’s progression from despair to hope, from mourning to praise, quite powerful. At times in the last several years, I’ve sung this song with various looming conflicts in mind: The throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza, and the increasingly polarized political climate of election seasons were met with my recitation of Longfellow’s triumph, “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep / God is not dead, nor does he sleep! / The wrong shall fail, the right prevail!” It was comforting to sing this in church, to be serenaded by a cacophony of voices devoted to the same hope I had. My most profound experience with the song, however, was when I truly heard those old familiar carols, played on bells from a church I’d never attended. There’s a certain comfort to pondering this song now; both my congregational and my personal experience of Longfellow’s story remind me that God cares for his church as well as each lowly sheep in his flock.
I’m reminded of when Jesus Christ addresses his “little flock” in the Sermon on the Mount, admonishing them not to be anxious:
Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! … Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! (Luke 12:24–28)
Of course, in my context, my anxieties were more intense than finding food and clothing. But they were rooted in a basic worry that characterizes all our fears: that the world is too vast, and God may be too elusive to tend to our little lives. In Jesus’ own words and deeds, he revealed the immanence of God. This revelation of closeness wasn’t something that Jesus started at approximately age 30; it was his first act in the miracle of the incarnation, and it would undergird every miracle, every dinner with the outcasts of society — ultimately, his birth, life, death, and resurrection were signs of Emmanuel, God with us.
What’s even more striking about Jesus’ sermon here is that his primary focus is not merely upon God’s provision of our needs nor his ability to deliver us from turmoil, but rather about the hope of eternal life with him. Want of comfort and need of food must be expected, Jesus states, so he implores his flock to suspend their finite need-seeking for an infinite hope:
For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you. (Luke 12:30–31)
Last year, I despaired that Christmas wasn’t coming. I thought it was stripped away from me by well-meaning nurses with latex gloves. But, in truth, it was the truest Christmas I’ve ever experienced. Drained of its pageantry and consumerism, its American pop-culture aesthetic and its family tradition, all I could do was contemplate the baby Jesus Christ in a manger, his coming to earth less adorned than our observation of it from a hospital room. I sat there with my mother as the world spun on. People got things they’d wished for all year, saw people they love or can’t stand or barely know; shopping and playing and movie watching and consuming abounded. Meanwhile, amidst subtle pumps of oxygen and beeps from various monitors, I saw the small Christmas tree we set up in the windowsill. The Canva-designed and cheaply printed Bible verses taped to shelves and cabinets. I was reminded how subtle Christ’s coming was. Though it would become revolutionary — it would split the earth (Matt. 27:51) and upend the Roman Empire (Acts 17:6) — his first arrival was swaddled in smallness, frailty, intimacy. Through those timeless carols resounding from church bells on Christmas Day, God asked me, “Will I not much more clothe you?”
What could fall away this Christmas — yet still preserve the Christmas feeling? This year, I’ve learned the answer: everything. (From my journal, 12/26/2024)
My response was not as triumphant as Longfellow’s crescendo. But that moment served as a reminder of the hope imparted to those who believe in the Christ who emptied himself to bring his little flock inseparably and eternally close.
The hope of salvation was revealed in dark times, in an unassuming manner, for the carpenter and his humble wife. Last Christmas was devastating and excruciating, but it was the most profound and formative Christmas I’ve ever experienced. In a hurricane of anxiety and fear, at my lowest point, I was reminded how low our redeemer was brought. Surely, if he bridged the gap from heaven on a deep, cold winter’s night, his sweet words decades later must be true:
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32).
“Last year, I despaired that Christmas wasn’t coming. I thought it was stripped away from me by well-meaning nurses with latex gloves. But, in truth, it was the truest Christmas I’ve ever experienced.” Beautiful.