“We can’t receive the story God has for us—the story He has written, a love letter chicken-scratched on the fence, meeting us where we are—if we don’t first notice how we relate to that fence.”
— Hagerty, Sara. The Gift of Limitations: Finding Beauty in Your Boundaries (p. 122). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Growing up I would see my mom daily facing the ups & downs of her disability. Some days were filled with physical pain brought on by debilitating fibromyalgia and she would lean heavily on her cane while walking. While other days she would be upright and steady. The cost of chronic pain would be taxing with depression, frustration, and mental fatigue.
Despite these constant pressures, she loved music and would often take out her guitar and play worship music on the living room floor. She would lead our small Anglican church in worship nearly every Sunday and would never miss a practice with the church band. Nor would she ever leave a campfire while in the hills of Kananaskis Country without leading us all in joyful songs while watching the embers rise in the starry night sky. Pain and all, my mother never left an opportunity unanswered to give paise to God.
Christmas was perhaps her favorite time of year. Every year, she would put her favorite Christmas record of Amy Grant on the turn table and sing to it as though she was the lead vocal for a Christmas concert of one — Emmanuel, God with us!
Today, I journey a different path of disability, reminded of the spirit of joy and hope that she always carried during this time of year. Truthfully, it’s not always easy for those with disabilities to hold onto this vision that Christmas and Advent is a season of remembering that God is with us.
It is true that like many others, we experience the great joys of crowding a local Access bus and driving around the city with others while being filled with the wonder & beauty of homes being decorated in Christmas lights with inflatable Santa’s in their snowy front yards. If we’re lucky, someone brought a thermos of hot chocolate with styrofoam cups, so everyone could share. We brave the crowded inaccessible malls to maybe buy a few gifts for our loved ones, while navigating the tricky balance of strained budgets and stressful spending. And, at home we play Christmas music while having a few family and friends over to celebrate the love and care of a supporting community.
But Christmas and Advent can also be a time of struggle. Cold snowy weather can make it difficult to get around as wheelchairs get stuck in unshovelled paths and slushy parking lots. Pain can increase with fluctuating weather storms and temperatures that can drop over night — not to mention the salt and ice that stick to your wheels and cut your hands to shreds. Doctor’s offices close down and appointments are cancelled which can for some lead to greater isolation at home and the loneliness of small subsidized apartments. Caregivers in mass take holidays leaving care for individuals in the community strained at best, if not neglected or unfulfilled with the expectations of care being left to clients family and friends. And, the reminder of living in poverty is at a heightened level while you try to not become depressed from the changing provincial policies that are already affecting whether you can afford rent, food, healthcare supplies, or the overwhelming guilt that you can’t provide a gift at family and community gatherings.
For many, we wish only to quickly get through the season to find more normalized anxieties and stress in the new year. Where can Christmas hope come from? How can we hold to that first Christmas promise that Emmanuel, God is with us?
Recently, I came across something Sara Hagerty wrote in her book ‘The Gift of Limitations’:
“Slower still comes to you and me in the form of things we might otherwise see as fences. Slower still, as we embrace the “come, die, grieve, live” cycle that God gives us, can become the words we use to lead us before our bodies do. Come (choose to step forward and not stay stuck), die (let Him have His way with us), grieve (collapse into God and remember, in our collapsing, that our longings matter), and live (truly live)—and slower still as we go.”
Slow is not the natural path of the world today. Perhaps even more unnatural during the Christmas season. And yet the promise of experiencing hope at Christmas is found even more in the story of Emmanuel — God stripping everything of himself away to take the form of a completely dependant infant. Humanly speaking, exposing himself to the risk of disabled divinity in utter dependance on the care of his mother, father, shepherds, wisemen, and the community who came to a small stable that first Christmas and brought the only gift that truly mattered — Hope & Joy.
Revealing the presence of God with us at Christmas is not a matter of bringing the most glittery gifts to toy drives and flooding tables with donated food packages; although those can accompany a spirit of hope and well being. Like the rhythmic talents of the traditional drummers boy in many Nativity Scenes, its the small acts we take in relationally connecting with one another that builds a world of hope around us.
Angela Reitsma Bick in a short Advent devotional called ‘Hope Is Not Neutral’ shares the encouraging words of Nick Cave to a family in a moving letter:
“Unlike cynicism,” Nick Cave concluded, “hope is hard-earned and can feel like the loneliest place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial and it can lay waste to cynicism. Every redemptive act, as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy or showing him a thing you love or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in his hole. It shows the world and its inhabitants [that they] have value and are worth defending. It shows the world is worth believing in. [And] in time, you will find that it becomes so.”
Perhaps this Christmas, hope won’t arrive as a bright burst of cheer but as something quieter—an ember we choose to guard in the winds of our limitations and disabilities. Advent has always been a season that honours the slow, the small, and the vulnerable. It begins not with power and strength, but with a newborn cradled in a manger, dependent on the care and compassion of an unlikely expecting community. And it continues today wherever we dare to believe that our own limits, frustrations, and aches might still be places where God draws near and makes room for disabled joy, disabled grief, and disabled presence.
So as we move through this season—with its joy and pain, its crowded buses and unshovelled paths, its laughter, its loneliness, and its longing—may we remember that Emmanuel comes to disabled bodies, tired spirits, and tender hearts. Hope is not neutral. It is the stubborn decision to keep showing up for one another in small, redemptive ways: a song offered through pain, a shared cup of hot chocolate, a simple act of presence that tells someone they are worth defending.
And in choosing these small acts, we join that first circle of shepherds, parents, wanderers, and unexpected guests who gathered around the manger. Together, we become a community that makes room for real hope—hope that grows slowly, quietly, and faithfully. Hope that reminds us, again and again, that God is with us.
“Lasting happiness cannot be found in pursuit of any goal or achievement. It does not reside in fortune or fame. It resides only in the human mind and heart, and it is here that we hope you will find it.”
— Lama, Dalai; Tutu, Desmond; Abrams, Douglas Carlton. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (p. ix). (Function). Kindle Edition.
