If You Need A Christmas Miracle

We were hunting.

Hunting for the perfect Christmas tree.

Out on the tree farm, looking for Christmasy goodness in piny green.

We rode the wagon filled with straw, far out into the back acreage, this Christmas tradition.

When we come around the bend of trees, into the open field, we see.

This year's pickings are slim.

The field looks empty, hollow, and how are we going to find a tree here?

We drove, with the six kids, 30 minutes out to the farm to go to our usual place, rode the wagon way out to the back forty only to find....pitiful, piny trees.

We look and look and look.

More people come up in wagon loads and we realize that if we don't make a choice quickly, there's going to be nothing left worth getting and it's either pick the least pitiful one or try to go somewhere else.

We make our choice.

"Do you think that if we turn it, the holes will be toward the wall, and you won't notice?" I ask hopefully.

"Maybe."

We cut it down and haul it back to be bagged and loaded into the van with the eight of us.

Once home, we cut open the netting and it pops like a jack in the box in wild fullness...or emptiness.

"Where was the good side?"

"I thought for sure it had a good side, it looked o.k. out in the field."
We turn it and turn it.  Holes, holes and more holes.

And then we see, the hopelessly crooked trunk.  It looks like an S.  There is no way this tree will stand up straight in the stand, at all.

The frustration is building.  We turn it some more, we fight with the flailing tree to just...stand.  But it won't.  It just won't.

We get it up right.  We tighten it into the base.

"Just turn it a little," I say.

He does, and as it turns, suddenly it falls, crashing hard onto my husband who is laying under it turning it at the base.

"Are you alive?" I howl.  I can't really see him, just part of his leg.

"Yes, but barely," he says. "This might officially break me of this live tree tradition forever.  This is it.  This is the last year we are doing this."  He says it with finality.  "What are we going to do?  Go back and get another one?"
"Maybe if I notch the trunk up the side it can lay far enough over to keep it upright.  Maybe."

We notch it, give it one last try, and then

it stands.

Next we get out the lights, half of which have decided to go on strike against everything Christmas.

Now we need to go back to the store, buy more lights.  The kids are restless, done with this.

It is nine at night and we still don't have lights on this tree, not to mention decorations.

"This is going to be the ugliest tree we've ever had isn't it?"

By the time Jon gets back from the store, it's nine-thirty and kids have already been sent to bed.  But hearing the garage door, they come running.

"Can we decorate it?  Please, please?"

We hesitate.  "Yes, go ahead, maybe it will help this sad tree."

And Jon and I, we sit, exhausted and let the kids decorate. 

They are giddy and joyful and singing to the Christmas music as they hang colored balls late into the evening. 

And then, we see.  Something is happening in front of our eyes, a miracle.

This crazy tree, so full of holes, so hopelessly twisted, unable to even stand, it is becoming
before our very eyes, all this brilliant beauty.

But how?

What absolutely seemed impossible, for this tree to be anything but pathetic and pitiful, became possible. 

"It's a Christmas miracle!"

"It looks so beautiful!  But how?"

"It was grace."

And isn't it always? 

This grace that makes all of us, the broken and bent, the hopelessly unusable, the pathetic and pitiful, makes us His.

And He takes all this hopelessness and breathes Hope where there was none.

Mary, when she was told she would bear a son, the Savior of the World, she too asked that question, "But how can this be?"


"Nothing is impossible with God," proclaims the angelic voice.

The miracle of Christmas, that God in His grace would come down to this earth, come to fill all our bent and broken lives with His fullness, come to make us His and full of His glory.

How can this be?

Is anything too hard for God?

In the light of these Christmas moments, we remember the grace of this God who came down to our hopeless world and became the Hope for us all.

The One who makes all things possible.