All the splinters are popping up through the hairline cracks. They feel more like thorns. The Christmas season does that I guess: it brings all the painful experiences to the surface, and magnifies them.

I sat in the audience, watching my niece perform in our local children’s theater production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. The story alone brings up all kinds of emotions, and I choked back tears. But my thoughts kept wandering back to better days:

• Days when I played the role of Mary, and my middle child was baby Jesus in our church’s Christmas program.
• Days when Christmas didn’t come bundled with so much anxiety.
• Days when we hosted the annual Christmas party for our friends in our home.
• Days when we were lugging babies around from one house to another to see family for Christmas.
• Days when dreams were still dreams instead of broken, painful memories.

Those were the days of pleasure, before long-buried memories painfully surfaced. Before I started running hard and fast from God and myself, resulting in crippling fractures. Before I knew that healing often comes in stages, and what I thought was healing was merely strength for the next steps.

It’s been a long while since regret has had its way with me, but as I sat through the show, it hissed at me…whispering what could’ve been, what might’ve been…if my lifetime of circumstances and choices had been different.

Later that evening as I sat in my bedroom floor wrapping gift after gift with tears spilling over my eyelashes, I told Mark how I feel empty. How it crushes me not to stand with community and sing carols on Sundays, yet I just can’t go back inside the walls where I spiritually suffocated. How I’m nauseated with the way relationships seem to be going through the herky-jerky dance motions of one step forward, three steps back. How I don’t even dare to hope because I can’t bear to watch anything else in my life go up in flames.

As all the words tumbled from my lips, the voices of regret and despair quieted: It is what it is. Let it be.

There are times in the healing process when the silver lining of redemption and restoration is obscured by the darkness. When What if things had been different? overshadows any glimmer of goodness. The glow of Christmas lights; the sounds of music laced with words like home and dreaming and wonderful; the movies in which every wish is granted…they stir the reminders of brokenness.

Then I read the words of an angel: Nothing, you see, is impossible with God. And the words of a young virgin just told she would conceive the Son of God: Let it be… 

And I think about the scandal of an unwed, pregnant girl during those days; the honor and courage of a man who took her as his wife and refrained from sex until the child was born; the humble beginnings of the King born in a stable; how simple men and wise men alike made their ways to worship; and how the threat of death followed Jesus from the manger to the cross. I think about how humbling and harsh circumstances paved the way of the Redeemer.

In my own wisdom, there’s no purpose for all the pain. But filtered through the light of the magnificent Christmas story, redemption is exposed. I’m reminded that nothing is wasted:

It’s from the deepest wounds
That beauty finds a place to bloom 
And you will see before the end
That every broken piece is
Gathered in the heart of Jesus
And what’s lost will be found again

Nothing is wasted
Nothing is wasted
In the hands of our Redeemer
Nothing is wasted

(~from “Nothing Is Wasted” by Jason Gray)

I’m reminded again that after all these years, God is still making all things new…for with Him, nothing is impossible.

Let it be…