Advent: From Loss to Victory

By: Chris Johnson

Ever since reading an article by Molly Hemmingway extolling the wonder of the Advent season nearly a decade ago, December 1st through the 25th has been one of my favorite times of the year. I think for about every year since then, I’ve written as much in our December newsletter.

But December 1, 2023, the first day of the Advent season last year, was the worst day of my life, and it will forever change the way I experience the Advent season.

I woke in the early hours of the morning to sounds of distress from my wife, and the nightmare of every pregnant couple became our experience as our tiny little son was stillborn to my wife in her 18th week of pregnancy.

That evening, we buried our son in a little home-made casket quickly assembled by my skilled brother-in-law in our backyard.

We spent the next few weeks in a season of only slightly controlled chaos leaning on family, feeding on the outpouring of encouragement and love both from those close to us and from those from whom we never would have expected it, trying to help each other and our older children to process the loss of what we were all so excited for.

“He got to go straight to live with Jesus,” we told them. He didn’t have to go through the hard stuff in life that we all will.

It was that truth, and the truth of Romans 8:28, that “…for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” that echoed in my head in the following weeks and months.

Someday, God will use our experience to encourage someone else who’s struggling to trust in His goodness in a difficult moment of their life. Really, that’s the reason I’m writing this now, perhaps now is that time for someone reading this.

Within just a few weeks of the passing of our little guy, whom we posthumously named Kuyper, we were celebrating our family Christmas, and rather than turn to Luke to read the Christmas story, or to the Old Testament to read the prophecies of Christ’s coming as we’ve done in the past, this time we turned to 1 Corinthians 15:25-26 and read, “For he must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

The real reason for Christmas can be easily lost in sentimentalism: Hallmark movies, Coca-Cola Santas, Currier and Ives prints, Jingle Bells, and the Grinch.

When Christ is celebrated, its for his helpless state as an infant. To read most summations of the Christmas story is to read of a little baby boy born in poverty to a single mother who went on to save the world. And when boiled down to those elements, the Christmas story can resound with anyone in our time, Christian or not.

But that story, without the context of the rest of the Bible, doesn’t explain why Christmas is so important to Christians. We celebrate Christmas because Jesus came here for a reason, and that reason was made painfully clear to me on December 1, 2023.

Most Christmas carols don’t cover it, but one singer who is the front man for an Alternative Rock band, Dustin Kensrue, sang this on his Christmas album:

“This is war like you ain’t seen.
This winter’s long, it’s cold and mean.
With hangdog hearts we stood condemned,
But the tide turns now at Bethlehem.

This is war and born tonight,
The Word as flesh, the Lord of Light,
The Son of God, the low-born king;
Who demons fear, of whom angels sing.

This is war on sin and death;
The dark will take its final breath.
It shakes the earth, confounds all plans;
The mystery of God as man.”

If you are missing someone this Christmas season, and maybe it’s even preventing you from celebrating the holiday, remember this: our greatest enemy which separates us from our loved ones is Jesus’ enemy too, and He will not rest until He has crushed that enemy.

We celebrate Christmas because Christ came to conquer sin and death. That’s the reason for the season.

The story of my family’s loss of Kuyper isn’t over. Psalm 30:5 says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning,” and on October 1st, 2024, Jaelle Joy was born to our family.

While she can’t fill the hole that Kuyper left in our lives, she certainly does bring comfort and joy.

Our Advents from here on out will begin with the memory of the loss of our baby boy, and end in the celebration of the birth of Baby Jesus, Whose birth leads us to ask with the Apostle Paul, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

 

To view this article in your browser, Click Here

For more information, articles and newsletters, please check out our website at https://americandecency.org/

You can support ADA financially by visiting: https://give.cornerstone.cc/americandecency

 

---