Refugee

This has been a tough season for me. On Friday December 3rd my mother fell in her kitchen. She didn't tell us of the fall until the next day when she called to say she was not going to be able to make it to our production of A Christmas Carol. She said she'd fallen but was okay, just in a lot of pain.

After two trips to the ER and two stays in the hospital, Mom was diagnosed with compression fractures of her vertebrae and a fractured elbow. She eventually ended up in a nearby convalescent home. Yesterday she had some kind of emotional break down and ended up in ER again. She's back at the convalescent home today but confused, not doing well. A refugee in a place she does not want to be.

My relationship with Mom has never been an easy one; none of her three children have simple, easy relations with her. I stand by her hospital bed, a child, a man and an outsider all at once, like someone observing a difficult story but it is my story. The end is still unknown for my 87 year old mother but I am sad to see her in this state. In spite of all that has flowed between us in my 57 years of life, I grieve to see her as she is, a refugee of sorts forced into exile in a hospital bed.

I've thought about this state of being a refugee and see that I too am a refugee of sorts, perhaps all of us are. We wait and long for a true home. Part of what we celebrate this 24th of December is God coming to make a way for us to finally go home. It is a wonder, a beautiful thing that we can, by faith, enter into.

I spent time today reading my favorite Christmas story, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. It's a short children's story that is a wonderful, very funny read that I highly recommend. The horrible Herdman's have taken over the annual Christmas pageant and give it new life from it's usual predictable flow. In the midst of the pageant, Imogene and Ralph, the two oldest who are playing Mary and Joseph enter in a bit late. The narrator says, "I guess we would have gone on humming till we all turned blue, but we didn't have to. Ralph and Imogene were there all right, only for once they didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they were in the right place-because of the candles, I guess, and the church being full of people. They looked like the people you see on the six o'clock news - refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't much care what happened to them."

Incarnation doesn't necessarily mean He became a refugee but there is something in this about the sacrifice in just coming for us. It was no small thing. As this day and evening unfolds, I want to remember His coming was to give us hope, light, life..... HOME. Refugees no longer.