But today, ugh, it's Meanday.
Maybe everybody finds it hard to get back to work on Mondays, or maybe it's just a case of me seeing what I expect to see, but Mondays tend to be the days I have the most rude customers and stressed out servers.
Today one guy was so nonchalantly mean in our brief exchange that I kept weeping for practically an hour. And I'm pretty sure at that point I was no longer crying for the meanness of the moment but for all the meanness, each unfairness and heavy blow that has ever crashed against my heart (which is less than many have experienced, I know, but enough to swamp me).
In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis talks about the way grief stains backward - when we're grieving, it hurts to look back at old memories, because the current sorrow paints them dark. He posits that joy stains backward too, and all the burdens we know on earth will seem insignificant and barely remarkable when we look back on them from the doorway of heaven.
I very much look forward to joy staining backward over 2020, with all of its small indignities and great sorrows.
Perhaps next Christmas will be sweeter because of the contrast of this year. Or maybe it will be harder, lonelier. But it will still be Christmas, with Jesus, God with us.
Even when people are unkind.
Even when there's no joy to stain forward or backward at all.
Even when I make disckusting food.
Always, Jesus, God-with-us.
Merry Christmas.
xo.
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