I’m sitting in the dark in a hotel room in LA, 5:40 local time, my #preciouschildren having been awake for an hour, thinking of how God has a way of doing things that keeps pissing me off.

Christmas is my favorite time of year. The anticipation, the lights, the magic floating through the air set to the tunes of familiar songs. The price of Christmas, though, is the days and weeks after: the taking down of ornaments, the tangling removal of lights, the vacuuming of needles, the tossing out of leftover food. I’ve never quite been able to match the sacredness of the season with gratitude for it in its aftermath. I’ve dabbled more, instead, in a bit of depression and self-pity. And counting down the days until next year’s marathon of A Christmas Story.

This year was a bit different.

This year’s Advent carried even more anticipation than usual: not only were we awaiting a #preciouschild’s birth, but we were preparing for our move to Sydney. “The definition of bittersweet,” one of my closest described it, and as we said and heard “I love you”s, gave and were enfolded in hugs (#kayhugs are the best), and shed and wiped tears (and butts, always), the meaning of the season rested differently. It burrowed its way deeper into my heart because I needed it more desperately. I needed the hope of the season, but more than that: I needed the hope that comes after it.

I needed Christmas to last. To last after the decorations were haphazardly thrown in the boxes the way I keep swearing I’ll never do again, to hang on well after the lights were dimmed and the pine diffusers faded away and the presents ended up in the donation bin. I needed the ridiculous story that I actually believe–of the baby born to a virgin and a star bringing shepherds and wise men and the whole damn thing–I needed it to be more real than ever, and I needed it to stay. I needed it to be with us as we were called away from the people we love and the place we call home and settle us into our new home, with new people.

It was the least it could do. After all, that story and the love it purports to show, the God it claims to have birthed? That love and that God are the ones doing this to us.

Hence the whole aforementioned “God pissing me off” tradition.

I think back on my story sometimes and how everything that led to a new chapter was brought about by discomfort. By a rattling of my familiar settings, a removal of my safety nets, a disruption of my plans. Some form of divine rudeness purporting to be love that led to the next thing. The next thing being chapters that were hard and beautiful, painful and wonderful: New York, The Husband, The Kid and Little Brother. And now, Sydney. It all began, and continued under, clouds of uncertainty mixed with nearly unbearable glory. Never one thing, but always everything. The price of Christmas: its glory and…the barren aftermath?

No. Not fully anyway, for if there is a faith that allows me to feel the full joy of Christmas, and a same faith that allows me to grieve its sacred anticipation, then that faith carries me now and transforms that grief into something different, something more; it transforms the disruptions into interventions and the rudeness into incomparable love.

Because there are the moments that are glimpses into its reality. Which brings me to this hotel room, and this seemingly mixed bag that is actually all blessing.

The weeks before our departure were marked with…everything. There were bouts of pink eye (LB’s and mine). There were TH’s trips and my solo days and nights with the boys. There were the moments of near insanity in those days and nights, and the moments of two boys burrowing into me on the couch. There were the episodes of stomach flu, the middle-of the night wake-up calls by TK or LB or my own gut, the hours spent in bed the day before we left, my packing plans dashed and my only strength lying outside myself. There were the goodbyes from people we knew cared, and from people whose words surprised us with their sincerity, whose tears caught me off guard and brought more of my own to the surface. There was Christmas Eve with family and laughter, the usual jokes with a poignant edge to them. There was Christmas Day with more laughter and more tears, the weight of leaving compressing the air around us. There were the minutes of holding Baby Niece, of watching her sleep and making her grin and seeing it all through my own watery eyes. There was that moment of The Niece’s face in the car window, tear-streaked as she waved goodbye, her note burning a hole in my hand: “I love you and I’ll miss you the holl time you’re gone.” There was the prayer led by one of my oldest and dearest friends as we stood in a circle in the driveway, hands clasped and hearts aching.

There was the strength that looked like weakness, the greater story told in tiny moments, the quiet truth of love showing up. It was so much like Christmas. And it stays.

It stays in this hotel room, where last night our boys tumbled out of their clothes in preparation for their car-wash shower and LB leaned against the wall like he was about to get frisked by a cop, and instead a long and perfect turd fell onto the carpet. It stays in TK’s grin to me from his seat as we prepared to take off, his giddy proclamation: “Mommy, I’m on a plane!” And he talked the whole flight, this boy who was without a word last year. There is the fact that without this family, without this man and these boys, the goodbyes would have been so much fewer and less freighted with meaning and that though they are so much of the story that is disrupting my previously-laid plans–everything from reading a good book to staying put, whatever that looks like–they are so much of what is making me who I am. I would not be me without them.

I would not be me without Christmas, without the ridiculous story of the baby boy showing up and disrupting everything.

This is a faith in which death happens first. Birth comes after. And life lasts long after Christmas Day, because it never ends.