I spent Christmas Day 2022 alone. Circumstances dictated I would have no family, friends, gifts or festivities to focus on. I was ok with it. In fact I looked forward to it resolving it would be the most spiritual Christmas of all: Church, intense study of the Saviour’s life, listening to Handel’s Messiah, watching Passion of the Christ. I was going to have the greatest connection to the Saviour yet.
Christmas Day came and found me in bed sick with a heavy head cold, too sick and unmotivated to carry out my good intentions. No Church, no study, no spiritually charged reflection….just loneliness and misery but…..a connection nevertheless. My aloneness and state of being did more to give me insight than all the planned inspiration that never eventuated. A vista of Christ’s life presented itself to my mind from the humble and unceremonious birth to the horror of Golgotha and Calvary, and in between I saw….loneliness.
This is what I came to understand: the lonely road The Saviour travelled while here would have been fraught with longing for what He had left behind…….something nobody else could understand with their mortal, finite minds. Even though some believed Him to be the Son of God, they would never have understood what it meant to leave His throne; they would have never understood the glimpses He had into eternal worlds He could not speak of; they would have never related to the higher ground He stood on; and they would never have grasped the agony awaiting Him. In short, the Saviour travelled a lonely road. One no doubt paved with many tears. It is true that once He had full knowledge of who He was, He would have had Father’s comforting spirit and the company of angels, nevertheless, these moments of reprieve must have made His feelings of isolation even more acute once they were withdrawn. The thought that comes to mind: so close, yet so far.
When we come to the stage in our lives where this world becomes less of a ‘reality’ and the yearning for the eternal becomes what is more real, we get a glimpse of the Saviour’s mortal life. This is the point where the longing for Father’s presence sets in. It is the moment to live for, because then we can leave the world behind and do anything necessary to make it back home. We abandon sins; we seek the living water that gives us life and power of endurance; we become bearers of truth and anchors of souls….we become like Him.
Did You miss
Your godly robes
That You traded for
The swaddling cloths of Calvary?
Was the ground rough beneath
Your feet as You traversed
The dust of Galilee?
The baseness of this earth,
So willingly suffered despite hostility.
Yet, You came:
The Father to reveal
And to Him forever
Our yielding hearts to seal.
- CATHRYNE ALLEN
(Art: Master by Hayley Miller)
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