Christmas Post

It’s post Christmas.

Food baby firmly tucked around my middle

Mild headache and they said at work today I looked defeated.

No defeat, just plain old fashioned exhaustion.

I know I’m not alone.

This year felt like a marathon, without training.

But right down the middle of all the crazy …

(rushing, cooking, cleaning, stupid late nights watching Christmas movies, navigating relationships in a crammed full house, checking work emails, shopping, wrapping – the same as all of you – but I’m a year older and for some reason just didn’t weather all this the same)

… there was this family … these long and lanky men and spunky young woman.

My heart beats outside my body in four places. When they’re here my eyes fill with the sight of them and my ears with the sound of their voices, various deeps and one light and bright, and the tread of their footfalls. I can’t get my arms around them enough, and then they’re gone, three of them anyway and I feel this bereft joy, that they were here, and now not. And I know #4 feels the gain and loss so deeply too.

Such help on the busy day, team Catfamily and we did it people, we got it all done together. Yay!!! My best happiness in all of it, the cooperation.

Family.

Deep conversations, music and lots of it, laughter and the odd spark but yet never a fire lit to an angry blaze.

And your Dad laid low with an infection, struggled through and managed to be well on the big day. Thank you Jesus for this mercy as he wanted to be in the midst of it all and in the end was, revelling in his own way at all the love.

Beat, my bursting heart, with the fulness and then the abrupt quietness at Christmas’ end.

Calm and slow the wild and whelming waves into rest and acceptance.

Keep my loves as they depart in all the ways and directions.

Bind us all together in You, Lord of this birth-day we celebrate.

Carry us by your grace into fresh vision and next things until,

We meet again.