Pathway Blooms

When I was fifteen I had to go away to school. From Monday to Friday I stayed with a family in a nearby town, coming home for the weekends. Arriving home each Friday afternoon, I would stand at the end of the kitchen bench while my mother worked on dinner preparation, rattling on and on about anything and everything that popped into my head. She never asked me to stop. We’d missed each other and it was catch-up time. Separation is sometimes difficult.

On the completion of my study, I was posted to a small country town where I knew no one. This time I had even more to miss. In addition to my family and friends, I missed my soon-to-be-husband. I missed everything about him. Oh how I missed him! It was a painful separation!

Some years later, just a few short months after our first daughter arrived, our little family found itself in a new city, once again far away from loved ones. It was a very difficult time. There was so much we wanted to share with people back home. We wanted them to see our little girl’s progress, to hold her and tell us how wonderful she was, to share in our joy. I wanted to hear my Mum say that the sleepless nights and our baby’s teething rattiness wouldn't last forever! I yearned to sit with her and swap baby stories, to find out what kind of baby I had been. I needed advice in the new, sometimes scary role that engulfed every minute of my day and my night. 

My husband left early each work day and often arrived home after dinner when our little girl was already tucked up in bed. They were lonely days. Before the internet and mobile phones, we survived on a flood of letters from home and the occasional phone call. In my lonesome, quiet hours I wrote literally hundreds of letters to family and friends. Penning the letters gave me an artificial sense of closeness but it evaporated when I signed off, much like it did at the close of phone calls from home. Sometimes separation is really hard!

Fast forward to 2014. This afternoon, just three days to Christmas ...

I joined the threads of people leaving the shopping centre. As the big doors closed behind me and I headed in the direction of my car, I sensed a small voice whispering, “Don’t forget what this is all about.” Walking across the parking area, ingredients for more Christmas cooking hanging from each hand, I had something akin to a little watershed.

I started to think what it must have been like for the God of the universe, to willingly let the only Son He had, leave home and go to live in a foreign place among foreign people. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like. They’d never experienced that kind of separation.

Years ago I experienced first-hand the ache that comes when you are separated from those you love. The cute little image of a baby in a manger belies the reality of what was really involved in that humble stable. A Father and Son were no longer living together as they had, since before the beginning of time. As He looked down at the babe in the manger, I wondered if God ached for His Son.

It was a separation born out of love, love for those this baby came to live among. In a sense Father and Son were separated for a time because of a love that is far too great to get my head around.

The baby in the manger didn't just mark the beginning of a separation though, it was also the demonstration of a promised reunion, the greatest reunion of all time, a reunion that happens when we choose to take up the gift that was offered on that very first Christmas!