Loving to sacrifice

The Christmas season has been fun, but to be honest, I’ve kind of been dreading Christmas, a bit resentful because it won’t be as comfortable as I want. Because I will have to sit through a 3-hour, freezing cold Christmas service that I won’t understand. Because I won’t be with my family and can’t celebrate the way I want. Because by the time you are settling down to Christmas dinner, I’ll be heading off to give final exams. In my mind, Christmas means happiness—having fun and doing all the traditions and eating food and opening presents. Christmas even means stress and busyness and crowded shopping malls.
But nowhere in my schema, in the file drawer labeled “Christmas” do I find the idea of sacrifice, of suffering. That’s what Christmas is: a love so great that it demands suffering and sacrifice. A Father who loved his Son so much that he sacrificed him. I don’t understand that kind of love. Even when I think of unselfish love it is something that protects and cares for and gives to and enjoys the one you love. But submitting them to helplessness, poverty, isolation, taunting, suffering, and horrible death? How is this love? Yet the Son, the object of this painful love, asked “that the love You have for me may be in them.” Approaching the hour of his greatest suffering, in the midst of his agony, he understood this love. Christmas is not soft lights or warm fuzzies; it is a love so great we can’t even comprehend it, a love that sacrifices to the last.

O Father, help, lest our poor love refuse
For our beloved the life that they would choose,
And in our fear of loss for them, or pain,
Forget eternal gain.

Teach us to pray; O Though who didst not spare
Thine Own Beloved, lead us on in prayer;
Purge from the earthly, give us love Divine,
Father, like Thine, like Thine.
(Amy Carmichael)


I can break off from anyone,
except the presence within.

Anyone can bring gifts.
Give me someone who takes away.
(Rumi)