In the absence of answers that satisfy, we are offered a promise of nearness: “The LORD is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). The gift of His nearness is the offer of a companion for the hardest journeys. Of course, a companion doesn’t make a valley any less of a valley. What a companion does, though, is offer comfort and care along the way. The kind of comfort we receive in His nearness replenishes us in ways we often can’t measure. It fills out our frames so we can stand; it keeps us on our feet, helps us take the next step, and then the next and then the next.
His nearness can be experienced in many ways, including in the love and presence of others. In some seasons, on some days, He brings us a Shandi. Other seasons, other days, He invites us to be a Shandi.
Can you think of a time when you felt God’s nearness to you when you were suffering? When you were broken or broken-hearted? What did it look like? Feel like?
Have you had an experience with a Shandi in your life? Or one in which you were called to be a Shandi?
Nearness and Intimacy
Nearness and intimacy are close (pun intended) but not the same. Intimacy can seem scary because it requires reciprocity; if we want to experience true intimacy, we must open ourselves up, make ourselves vulnerable. But nearness asks nothing of us. Nothing. God’s nearness to us, as Tim notes in this chapter, is the gift we all long to be assured of—God loving us and coming close to us and being with us when we need it most, without any demand on us.
Can you think of a time when you sensed God drawing near and inviting you to draw near to Him?
Do unanswered questions or unresolved pain (or anything else) keep you from drawing near to God?
How often do we draw near to others in their pain and hardships with absolutely no expectation of reciprocity or response?
Does this happen easily in your life and community? If not, what do you think keeps us from doing that more often?
Even when we keep our guards up and our eyes down, we can’t stop His nearness. To be sure, His nearness to us is an open invitation to intimacy, but in its simplest form it is just love incarnate loving us and inviting us to receive. May we receive the comfort and gift of nearness that replenishes us. And may we draw near to others in their need without demand for reciprocity or response.
Chapter 3: Uh-Oh Tannenbaum
What sentiment do I guess I might share with royalty, given the chance?
I mean, there must be a few. At the end of the day, we can’t be too different, can we?
As one who appreciates asking and discovering unlikely answers to obscure questions, I feel safe with this guess—that Prince Albert would feel as sad to see discarded Christmas trees abandoned curbside as I do.
“Prince Albert of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha.”
With a handle like that on your library card, you’ve got to guess life is going to be complex. Sure, some good, some bad, but mostly lots of complex.
No doubt a few eyebrows are going to be raised when a shy and awkward teenager looks to marry his first cousin. But scrutiny knows no bounds when that young man’s sweetheart kin is the heiress to the British throne.
Married to Queen Victoria by age twenty, he fathered nine children with her and lived an unimaginable reality by her side until his life was ultimately halted by typhoid fever in his early forties.
In his prime he carried a wildly contradictory reputation. Every story as an interloper is matched by one as a respected diplomat. Every tale as a wannabe is challenged by another as an influential statesman. He was known both nobly, with titles such as President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery, and less consequentially, with designations such as Chairman of the Royal Commission in Charge of Redecorating the Palace of Westminster.
Famous as the man whom Queen Victoria grieved in black over for decades after his passing, the namesake of a lovely city in the Canadian Prairies, and father to a son who inspired an exceedingly popular American pipe tobacco brand, Prince Albert, as lore has it, even has his own strange place in contemporary North American Christmas tradition!
While he didn’t do much of the heavy lifting in shaping the Christmas tree story, he is indeed credited in a big way with putting its tradition on the figurative and literal map.
Long before there was a Prince Albert, or a Prince Albert’s dad, or a Prince Albert’s dad’s dad…way back in ancient days, in ancient lands, many a people in the northern hemisphere believed that the sun was a god and that winter was a sign of the sun god weakening. To celebrate the passing of winter solstice—the shortest day and longest night of the year, and thus the start of healing and wellness of the sun god—it was common to adorn one’s home with evergreen boughs as a reminder of the growth, greenness and warmth that would soon return.
Variations on the same theme and practices abound throughout history and mores. Early Egyptian civilizations and Roman cultures celebrated sun gods with bountiful plant life, while Druids, Celts and Vikings did likewise with symbolic evergreens.
However, Germany is credited with the tree tradition as we know it today. There are both plausible sagas to embrace and bizarre tales that are much less so. The most famous in the plausible category is the one I like to think is true. It is this…
The greatly revered 16th century German Protestant-reformer Martin Luther was composing a sermon while walking through the woods on a crisp winter night. Captivated by the beauty of the stars shining brightly through the trees and exhilarated and inspired by the wonder of God, he would have a tree placed in his home, with candles affixed representing the constellations, as a reminder and in honour of Christ’s birth.
True? False?
Who knows for certain? But I like it.
Very much.
Fast forward a couple of centuries, and we are back to Prince Albert!
Part of the societal fuss over Albert’s marriage to the young queen of England in 1840 was that he was not of British descent. Albert, like Martin Luther, was born and raised in Germany. And so, Albert was a little boy who grew up knowing the German Christmas tradition of the Christmas tree, a tradition he brought with him into his marriage and newly into the Victorian kingdom. One that resulted in a single image sketched in 1848 that spread far and wide, that intrigued and inspired nations and that ultimately launched the Western world’s embrace of the Christmas tree: “the queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle.”
Thank you, Albert.
It’s quite a leap from convoluted royalty and radical reformation to my own Christmas tree attachment, but indeed, I do have one.
Most certainly, I grew up in an age when not only did most Canadian families have a decorated tree in their home at Christmas but anything but a real tree was a bit of a letdown. The artificial tree was still a suspicious notion, trading the ritual of an annual outdoor search for a department store one-time purchase. I grew up among those adamant that nothing could replace the smell of an evergreen in the living room. Admittedly, I am no less biased to this day.
But there is undoubtedly a lot of fuss that accompanies the matter, bother that makes decorative alternatives look mighty good to a number of people. I thought I knew it well enough growing up. I have numerous memories of leaning trees tethered to the wall with shoelaces, pets choking on low hanging ornaments, and needles still blowing out of heating vents months past Christmas.
Even still, it wasn’t until grade 11 that I pushed past the