I turned on the tree lights this morning. The dryer tumbles a load of mixed colors and textures, because separating laundry is too tedious a task for the day after Christmas.

The boxes and bags I collapsed and folded as we opened presents are a leaning tower peeking out from beneath the coffee table where I stashed them. There's still a pile of bows juxtaposed beside our coffee-table Jesus in his manger.

Can our gifts and their beautiful presentation hold weight on one end of a scale that holds God in the flesh on the other side?

 

The silver and china are clean and awaiting storage on the remnants of the Christmas tablescape in the dining room.

 

The untidiness lingers because, for the first time in years, I went back to work the day after Christmas. I usually spend the day after Christmas scrubbing our home clean of the lavish celebration.

 

This year, remnants of Christmas morning linger two days later. And while the lights bring the tree to life this morning, it looks stale not even 48 hours after we celebrated a newborn God birthed in a barn.

Because the mess remains this year, I am pondering the Messiah mixed with our forgotten wrappings, and why Christmas tree lights fail to cast any beautiful light on this scene today.

We need the other 364 days each year to parse what it means to live now in the aftermath -- now that we know a God, who is kind, came for us, a God who, if we allow him to, will wreck us only to right us.

I don't know how to live in light of this. How can it be stale today, already?

I make coffee, pack my lunchbox with more leftovers, and sit with a book and the stark, cold, quiet of being alone downstairs, unwrapped from the warm, peace of cocooned sleep my daughters still enjoy. I'm mulling the disarming questions as I open Small Victories.

Anne Lamott is exploring her fraught relationship with her mother, and I well with tears when I read this about her mother's ashes:

Sometimes a thing can change us in a moment. Light pierces the darkness, a baby God fulfills all the prophecies, angel hosts sing heavenly song to the earthen, and nothing is ever the same again.

But most of the time, we have to turn on the lights each cold, lonely morning and spend another day trying to figure out what it all means and how in this world we will live now in the days after knowing this benevolence. This might take some time.

Partly because I'm still embracing gray, and partly because I'm in a season of trial, I discovered lament. It's a facet of Christianity absent from my experience and theology.  But in the midst of trial, it's proving an apt tool to process pain, frustration, anger, hopelessness, confusion, sadness, hope, love, fear, desperation, disillusionment -- all the raw emotions that accompany grief and suffering.

If I'm going to feel all these things anyway, I might as well feel them before the Lord. Exposing my worst self to God is risky and bold and dangerous. But, defiant against my fear, I expose myself nonetheless, because I can't find a safer place to do the ugly, untidy, faltering parts of faith.

That is how lament is an act of faith rather than evidence of no faith. We take the parts of life that don't seem to jive with a loving God directly to the Source and in so doing acknowledge he is, indeed, God. And going to him for answers we don't have but desperately desire implies that he has them, whether he shares them or not.

Faith isn't having it all together when we stand before the Lord. Faith is standing before the Lord as helpless and hopeless save for Him. Faith is admitting we are shockingly unsuited for this life without him. A robust faith not only embraces the lamenting of this fact but requires it and is woefully shallow and incomplete without it.

Anything and everything, big and small, that we need to grieve, wrestle with, and agonize over deserves to be grieved, wrestled and agonized in God's presence. Every single thing we need to say out loud, we should say to God.

I cannot urge you more strongly: say it to God! Even if it's borderline blasphemous and you have to apologize in humility for it later. Bravely and brazenly say it all: every bitter thing, every mean thing, every sad thing, every mangled thing, every angry thing, every unfair and unjust thing, every selfish thing. Bring them all. Empty your inadequate, unfortunate, disgraced and disgraceful self before him.

Job has taught me that God will patiently hear our grievances. Take a minute to take that in. God listens to our laments. He hears us, sees us, and knows us.

Job brought his hard questions, his suicidal thoughts, his protest, his arguments. He persisted, crying out his pain and insisting upon his innocence. God listened so well and remained so silent that Job concludes God is disastrously absent and begins to despair.

Only when Job has exhausted himself against a fearsome God does God speak. He moved from Heaven to Job's heartbreaking circumstances in the vehicle of Job's lament.

God comes to Job precisely when Job has no more fight left in him. God brings his strength to the express time and place where our strength fails. He holds us when we can't hold on anymore.

It is grace: we receive everything when we deserve nothing.

God finally gifts Job with his presence and his conversation. Job learns that God had listened all along, and then God asks more difficult questions than Job's. God's harder questions somehow reassure Job God is capable and competent. Not one of Job's words of lament tumbled out unto a deaf, mute, detached, uncaring, or unable God. They spilled out unto a God who, moved by compassion, comes close and enters our torturous circumstances and offers his intimate presence.

Job courageously voiced his agony and grievances to God and found a hard-won, long-awaited, almost-unrealized, glorious communion.

Job had heard of God with his ears, but now saw God with his eyes much like Jacob wrestled with God and limped away blessed.

So risk it. Speak your grievances to God. Wrestle with him. You will surely lose, but it's better to lose and limp forever than walk without truly knowing God. The choosing to speak openly in complaint and wrestle through lament is a choice to lose your life so you can find it.

The horrifying and harrowing paths that lead us to the end of ourselves can also wondrously lead to the Lord. And lament is the most efficient mode of travel for such treacherous terrain.