Mid-November to mid-January is my least favorite time of year. This did not use to be the case. I used to love it. I would eek out Christmas as long as I possibly could. I loved the lights, the color, the way it seemed to make everyone smile just a little more.

Then trauma entered my holidays. Take-my-breath-away memories. Heaviness and paralyzing fear replaced joy and anticipation.

Trauma isn’t my reality any more. It is the past. But trauma is a wily thing. It doesn’t seem to want to recognize time. Nor does it distinguish between real versus perceived versus non-existent.

This year the pounding in my chest, the lightheadedness and nausea still visited. They didn’t come with the flooding of memories, and they came less often, but their power was the same. I felt a suffocation to be happy. No one told me that was an expectation. No one shamed me for not being able to smile. But all around me was happiness. And cheer. And delight.

I just didn’t feel it.

As evidence of my changing reality, my love asked boldly on my behalf for a very un-crappy Christmas. Every day he asked the Father. My whole tribe was gracious to make Christmas as simple as I needed it to be. The tree went up, and we baked the memories we hold most dear. But that was it.

Christmas came, despite my protestations, and it was very un-crappy. I would even say it was lovely.

This is the place where I want share the life-changing lesson I learned. I want there to be a piece of enlightenment that will change every Christmas yet to come. But there isn’t.

I made it through the day. It wasn’t traumatic, and I experienced no panic. But I didn’t know joy either. Joy continues to elude me. Slowly I am building the muscle to not beat myself up about that. I am growing in self-compassion.

My simple Christmas did make me see less of the tinsel and more of the babe. My need is so great for the Hope that came into the world that night over 2000 years ago. In the absence of joy, I was acutely aware of my brokenness. I am so, so broken.

I confess this Christmas season what I wanted to know was not my brokenness but my healing.

So I am thankful for my Very Un-Crappy Christmas. I just want more.

Hard happens in every life. Most bounce back, whether by health or denial. For me, this season has robbed me of resilience.

Wounds have run deep ruts I have not had the strength or endurance to climb. I have screamed and yelled and begged for rescue.

But I didn’t really know what I was asking.

My picture of rescue was to be lifted out of the valleys. I wanted the pain to go away. Healing would mean the fear that grabs me so tightly would strangle no more, and the explosion of sorrow in my heart would be snuffed. I wanted to be fixed.

In the past days, I have seen the glimmers of healing. Hope flashing in the pit, as if a gem catching the sun.

I saw it, and it caught me. It’s lightness stayed with me. And so did the pain.

I see this to be true: healing does not come in the disappearance of pain but in the learning of how to sit with it.

Healing does not soften the blow of the offenses that run so deep. To lessen the pain would be to dismiss its impact. Part of my healing has been to name those places and agree even with myself that they matter. No, healing does not remove the pain.

My hope glimmered in the place where I sat with my pain and didn’t feel the choking of fear.

At the depths of the pit that consumed me, I fully believed my pain would kill. I felt as if my body were shutting down. Pain was overwhelming me to a point of death, sucking the very air out of my lungs.

To some that sounds dramatic and extreme hyperbole. But to those who have walked through it, it is real. Depression brings despair even to body and bones and breath.

After months of my hope-speaking counselor believing resilience for me, speaking it over me despite my adamant refusal of its existence, I am beginning to believe it for myself.

I’m ok. Hard things have happened and much of the hard still bears its mark, but I’m ok. The paralyzing fear is at bay. I see the light at the top of the pit, and it’s getting closer. Brighter. One day I might even stand atop it.

Hope is precious. Today it is glimmering.

Moses’ arms were burning. They had been up for hours. The staff of God was raised overhead, the weight of it now unbearable. The fire began in his wrists, burned down his forearms and raged in his shoulders. He willed them not to quiver, not to break. His will was running out.

The Israelites’ fate against the Amalekites depended on him. As fatigue overtook him, and he lowered his arms out of exhaustion, the Israelites wavered. The Amalekites began to win. He pushed the staff back up and Israel regained their footing. They took back the lead. Moses had to keep the staff raised for the Israelites to be victorious. It took all of his concentration to keep the pain from winning. There was no way he was going to make it.

And then his concentration was interrupted. He felt the hands of Aaron and Hur steady his shaking arms. They saw his pain. They saw his need. They would stand with him.

They found a rock for Moses to sit on, and as he sat, they lifted his arms. They kept them steady until sunset, when Joshua overcame the Amalekites with the sword. They did it.

This is one of my very favorite pictures in Scripture of the power, the shear need of community. Moses could not do it. He couldn’t. He tried, and he willed, and he struggled. So his friends literally held his arms up. It’s beautiful.

Can I confess something? In my deepest of places, I wish I didn’t need people. Over and over again, that need brings pain. Disappointment. Rejection. Right now I desperately need my arms to be lifted for me.

I am left struggling.

There are those who pass through. A conversation here, a prayer there. People know my story. But very, very few are staying with me until sunset. I catch my breath for a few, but then I’m back at it again on my own. Trying to hold up the weight of the staff that will save.

Community feels like the key to the puzzle I will search for and never own. I initiate, I pursue, and in need, I am still alone. 

At the end of the day, I can not make community happen. I can ask, I can share, but I can’t force it into existence. If we were created to live in community, and community is where healing happens, why is it so stinkin’ hard to experience?

If I am honest, and I’m pushing myself to be painfully so in this place, as much as I want to be able to go this alone, I cannot. I have been trying. But my arms are so weary. I want to say that isn’t so, but it is. Day after day, I need a few someones to hear my anxiety and not grow tired of praying for it. I need someone who can speak hope when my thoughts turn so dark they scare me. I need someone who will call me and say, “Are you out of bed today? Get dressed. Let’s face the exhaustion together.”

I need a community to raise my hands.

There is a voice lurking, saying I am too much. It says I’m doing it wrong. My perseverance runs so very thin. My hope-speaking counselor curses at that place for me. I will learn to curse at it too.

My husband speaks a different hope. He said I should ask God for it. Ask God for the community I need. Asking bares the risk of disappointment. But I will.

In my brokenness and exhaustion, I will ask.

I returned to work two weeks ago, and I’ve lost all rhythm.

My sabbatical afforded me the freedom of no schedule. I put in my day the things I wanted. The things I hoped would help me walk forward in darkness.

Then I jumped on a moving train.

My hope-speaking counselor kindly pointed out today I’ve stepped back into my numbing clothes. Convenient how busy-ness covers my hurt. My anger. My disappointment.

It was a hard truth to hear. The past six weeks have felt like climbing a wet, slippery mountain. It has taken all my energy to keep moving toward the summit. I do not want to slide down. I do not want to have to struggle up again. The work feels too much.

I feel broken, and I’m not sure it’s in the best way. I feel so inadequate, so ill-prepared to go where I’m pretty sure hope resides. I know that sounds absurd. Tenacious used to describe me almost better than any word. There is so little energy left in me to keep pressing into the deep now.

The hope-speaking counselor suggested I stop running. He likened it to being in a maze, frantically searching for the way out. What would be more helpful would be just to sit down and be where I am. Why do I fear that so very much?

The maze feels as if it’s closing in again. I need space. I need arms to hold me up and a face to witness my tears. My courage is so very thin.

This is the place where I sit. The words that tumble into this space in the cyberworld are where I where I practice just being where I am.

I have less and less an idea of what the summit will be like, but I do believe hope lives there. I wish I had a nice ribbon to wrap around the now to make it easier to walk, and perhaps easier to read, but there is no ribbon right now. There is just mess. You are bearing witness to it all. Thank you. Thank you for sitting with me.

I took a stand against shoulds long ago. Or at least I thought I did. I have seen one follower of Jesus after another drown under what they “should” do. Shoulds do not fan freedom. They suck life.

This week, I heard my hope-speaking counselor say something he’s been saying all along. Only this time, my ears could hear. Some of the weight I carry, some of what makes it so much work to get out of bed and tackle the demands of my crazy life, I put there.

The shoulds I hate so much lay on me as a suffocating blanket I can not get out from under. I’m struggling for air, struggling for light.

They crept in as thieves in the night. I did not see them.

They are trying to do the right thing, trying to avoid hurt and dysfunction. Pursuing intimacy in my marriage and protecting my kiddos from the arrows of my own wounds. The pursuit of emotional health has ensnared me. The voices of good I hear paralyze me. There are a million very good shoulds I can not live under.

I need freedom. The hope-speaking counselor is good at giving me permission. I’m just not good at feeling it.

I do not want to mess this up. Not because I don’t want to mess up but because I desperately want the good that is suppose to come from it.

I am losing me in the process.

I have to learn how to give up the shoulds. They are dreadful because in and of themselves, they are good and profitable. My pile, however, is so big and so heavy, it has distorted my sight. It has distorted my gait and my very soul.

This is the space where I need grace in its greatest measure.

The honest truth is that the shoulds bear bitterness in me. I can’t offer them freely. They are a pretending.

What a hard and ugly place.

I cling to this little flash of hope that comes alive, as the hope-speaking counselor challenges me to actually own what I feel instead of try to feel my picture of right. There is freedom in that place. There is light and lightness.

Let grace come. Let it wash over me and breathe hope.

My ears didn’t hear hope from my hope-speaking counselor today. I heard hard. And the hard felt stone cold against my fragile heart. He spoke that the more health I experienced, the more my discontent would grow.

I’m not going to lie. It sucked.

I so much want a hope I can hold onto. I want to touch it and feel it and see its colors. I want to smile as it breathes life back into weary, weary bones. I want comfort.

I want relief.

The hope-speaking counselor won’t give it to me. Instead, he sends me further into the raw places that take my breath away. I am trying my best to hold those places together. But he is relentless. I am crumbling.

The madness is that as I crumble, I feel the stirring of life. I feel it.

He calls to the deepest places of what I want. Not to what is easy or comfortable or even right. Though I have a feeling those will be waiting at the end.

He calls to what stirs my heart. I have silenced it for so long. He speaks that it matters, and everything in me fights his words. The more I feel, the greater my discontent.

This is the opposite of relief. There is no comfort. It does not feel good or restful or happy.

Anger bubbles as I type the words I know to be true: my hope-speaking counselor is speaking hope. I fight just to stay in the fight. I do not want what he is saying. I do not want that reality.

And yet I do.