Hope for the journey

 

Holidays have the tendency to lose their connectedness to their origins.  I suppose it’s inevitable.  None of us were there at the first Christmas, Easter, or to a much less profound degree, Thanksgiving, to really understand the profound moment it was.  Even the very word "holiday" is rarely connected to its origin, "holy day."

We feel called to mark special experiences with a moment of pause and reflection.  Anniversaries recognize the faithful endurance of highs and lows in a relationship.  Civic holidays mark moments of national achievement, like our Independence Day on July 4.  And our religious holy days remind us that the journey we travel now is possible only through the light and grace of God.

It’s the journey that gives meaning to the holiday.  And that journey, as we hear in the Gospels (Luke 21:12-19), is not always easy.  If the journey were easy, there’d be no need to celebrate holidays. Disappointments and failures, hardships, hurt and sadness – even betrayal, as Jesus says – are woven into the story of our lives.  In a couple of days we celebrate Thanksgiving, which traditionally marks the bringing in of the harvest after months of punishing toil on the raw, tough and at times unforgiving land.  The harvest was not only a celebration of a successful growing season but the promise of making it through a long, cold winter ahead.  It only became a national holiday when President Lincoln called the nation to a moment of prayer and thanksgiving in 1863 in the middle of the long, grueling experience of the Civil War.  2020 has given many of us a fresh meaning to the holiday, as our national struggles this year are just as extreme as they were in 1863, even if we weren’t also dealing with a pandemic!

Jesus doesn’t promise a road easily travelled.  He promises that He will be our companion along the way.  He’s not going to take away the hardships or hurt or sadness, but He will accompany us through these to new life.  He can guide us and encourage us, urging us not to give up.  And in the end, like the Pilgrims 400 years ago or a young married couple celebrating a first anniversary, we can sit together in awe and say to one another, "I don’t know how we did it, but here we are.  Thanks be to God!"