Home for Christmas

When I was in college, I remember looking forward to going home for Christmas. In that almost four-weeks break between the end of the fall semester and the start of the spring semester, I could rest up, sleep late, read all I wanted to, and spend time with the friends and family I had known most of my life.

Later, after I moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and began living with my sister, we started doing Christmas here, first in one of the two apartments we lived in and later at our house. Our parents would come up and stay as we used to do with them. My brother’s family started coming from Arkansas for a few days before Christmas when we lived in the two bedroom apartment over on the east side of Fort Worth—nine of us in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment. We were crowded, but we were family, and it was fun for the short time we were together.

When we bought the house, we had more room for everyone to sleep, and more room to spread out for the gift exchanges. After Daddy died in 2002, home for Christmas began to mean the trip to Conway, AR, to spend the holiday with my brother’s family, including my sister-in-law’s extended family. Mom was with us in the Christmas of 2002, and then she went on to join Daddy in 2003, so that was the first Christmas we had without our parents. I had read a book then about that final going home for Christmas, spending it in heaven with the One Whose birthday we celebrate, as well as with relatives and friends who moved on before us. What a great homecoming awaits us then! 

This week, a good friend from my Sunday school class, Jerry Kilgore, went home for Christmas. She had been in the hospital since suffering a massive heart attack a month earlier, and although there had been no change in her condition during that time, her friends and family were praying for divine intervention, that she would be restored to good health. She was only 52, just a few weeks older than my sister, and nine years younger than I am. 

In fact, not knowing that Jerry had already moved on into the mansion that was prepared for her, I prayed that very prayer for divine intervention in her health yesterday morning in Sunday school, as well as for her family and the exhaustion they were feeling after spending much of the last month at the hospital where there was little encouraging news. God did intervene, but not in the way we imagined. He healed her completely by leaving her damaged, imperfect body down here on earth for a perfect one in heaven. “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ (from Isaiah 25: 8) ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ (from Hosea 13: 14, recorded in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15: 54-55 NIV). 

Or in the words of John Donne, one of my favorite poets from the 17th century:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. 

I’ve modernized the spelling, but Donne’s words still carry comfort today. For the Believer, physical death isn’t an end. It’s like falling asleep and waking up in a place more wonderful than we can imagine, like walking through a doorway separating time and eternity where we are surrounded by our family and friends, never to be separated again.

And while Jerry was a great friend, and all her friends at church, at work, and in all other phases of her life are sad that our time with her is over in this life, we know that she will be there in the Life to come, waiting for us with all who have gone on before us, and there we will all be together forever. For now, we’ll enjoy Christmas with our friends and family here, missing Jerry but knowing she is really home for Christmas this year, home for a celebration that we can’t even imagine until we join her there.