My wife has noticed a pattern in my life. Every year, as the cold sets into Delhi, I settle into a subtle sadness. This year, she noticed that I am turning to sugary comfort food. She saw me spending too much time on Netflix and sleeping later and later in the night. It is as if I am trying to pacify my body because it remembers what I want to forget.
Last week, my wife and I were speaking to our therapist about it. She is someone who listens to us well and teaches us to listen to Jesus. I told her how turning to comfort food feels like a coping mechanism for a sadness I cannot name.
The cold, gloomy, hazardous air quality of Delhi in winter does not help. As the days become shorter, the will becomes weaker.
I can think of plenty of reasons for sadness—the absence of my mother who is now with the Lord, the daily grind of life in a megapolis like Delhi, the despairing state of the world’s affairs, and some sadness so personal I do not have the desire to name it. As it turns out, my mind may be suppressing it, but the body remembers.
Our therapist asked about what Christmas was like when I was a child. I told her I grew up hating the season. It felt superficial, childish, and inauthentic like a translucent veil of happiness trying to conceal the obvious shape of misery in everyone’s lives.
All I wanted for Christmas was for the season to end so that life could return to its normal state of misery.
I drew some comfort and much self-righteousness from the story behind the first Christmas. It was marked by feelings of fear, loneliness, confusion, darkness, and isolation (Matt. 1:19, 2:12-14, 17-18, 22-23).
Where was the happy-clappy, Christmas-carolling, stocking-filling, cake-eating Christian then? Surely I was more righteous than all the jingle-bell jolly-mongers, parading through the streets with fake smiles and new clothes.
While most people think of Christmas as families spending time together, it was at Christmas that my family felt most apart. My father was an evangelist, whose work took him on the road at Christmas time.
My Christian friends felt like my family during the year. But at Christmas time they would be appropriately absorbed by their families. It felt like Christmas was when all my families disappeared.
The most exciting thing about Christmas and New Year’s Eve was the special screenings, double-features, and late-night movies on television. I watched them, happily and sadly, all alone.
Then I was a child. Now I am an adult.
My wife and I planted a church and became responsible for how we celebrated the Christmas season. This was a gift. It felt like the season was a lump of clay and we could give it the shape we wanted, so it could honour the feelings of the first Christmas—comfort for the fearful, company for the lonely, peace for the confused, light for all in darkness, and the promise of Emmanuel God with us for those in isolation.
My heart began to feel differently at Christmas time.
Then my wife and I had a daughter. We had the opportunity to make Christmas memorable for her, to give her the presence of family that I missed when I was a child. It felt like healing to give her memories of Christmas that may prepare her heart for the gift of Christ.
Yet, after so many years, my body’s first and natural response to the winter season is sadness.
It is the grace of God that the body remembers because it wants to bring into the light what the mind wants to keep in the dark. It also unmasks our hearts’s tendency to gratify physical desires in a desperate attempt to pacify deeper, spiritual needs (John 7:37-38). This too, is a gift of grace.
However, by the grace of God, every body can be trained to be joyful in the very times it was most familiar with sadness (1 Tim. 4:7-8, 1 Cor. 9:26-27). The past does not control the future. Jesus is the great interrupter.
In his miraculous birth, he interrupted history’s great downward spiral into chaos. He became our great Emmanuel, God with us (Matt. 1:23).
Not content to interrupt history, he wants to interrupt the story of our lives. He knocks on the door of our hearts and asks to be let in, so he can make his home in our hearts through his Spirit, bind us to a new eternal family, and give life to our mortal bodies (Rev. 3:20, Eph. 3:17, Eph. 2:19-22, Rom. 8:11).
The body that remembers the past can be trained to remember the future.
The birth of Christ means the heavens and the earth will be born again. God will bring a new creation where he will make his dwelling with us. We will be his people. He will be our God (Rev. 21:3).
The power of this hope in Christ is at work in my body. Each year it gives me greater victory, deeper resilience, and quicker recovery from the onset of sadness.
Like a seed planted in soil that slowly works its way through to the surface, on its way to becoming a tree by a well-watered stream, the power of Christ helps us work out our salvation, creating fresh neural pathways in our brains (1 Pet. 1:23, Ps. 1:3, Phil. 2:12-13).
Like self-controlled athletes, we can train ourselves to be godly, and make every thought captive to Christ (1 Tim. 4:7-8, 1 Cor. 9:27, 2 Cor. 10:5).
The Lord, who is the Spirit, gradually transforms us into the likeness of Christ with ever-increasing glory, until he will completely transform our lowly bodies into his glorious body (2 Cor. 3:18, Phil 3:21).
In his kindness, God creates a desire in our hearts that only he can gratify. Then he satisfies it with his love, as with the richest of foods (Ps. 63:5). He touches our stories of sadness with his hope and turns them into songs of joy.
By his grace, he does the best thing he can do for our bodies. He fills them with his Spirit and comforts them with his love.
“For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” (2 Cor. 1:5).
