Sierra V. Fedorko

I reached for my pencil, but it wasn’t there anymore. Proof my 1-year-old daughter had ran off with it somewhere. I remembered seeing her with the pencil earlier that day and I also know it got somewhere safely. No walls drawn on to my knowledge😅, but I had to get a different pencil to write the first draft of this poem, and there’s poetry in that.🧡

Christmas has been all sorts of things in the last 6 years. Longing. Grieving. Yelling at God angrily with my scribbling pen. Always grace. So much comfort. Wishing my 4-month old boy a Merry Christmas, carrying my Spring-daughter around on my hip. Reaching for my pencil and it not being there because that same little Spring took off with it somewhere.

And I think if I could sum up the last 6+ years of Christmases in a poem, I’d say it like this…

For them, I prayed, but mostly I cried.
I cried in their absence, I cried for
their absence, I cried in jealousy,
sad-rage.

Tears hung me out to dry,
but I discovered God was good and
numbing winters in my house at Christmas turned my bones to seeds
of joy, a beginning of new
life.

When I walk in the woods now
to the sound of my children where I walked in silence before, I marvel what God has done, and sometimes I forget, and still God is unchanged,
good.

So there it is, and there they go, the feet of my children pattering where
once I had been buried—
the kitchen sink, old feather chair, now-new linoleum floor, and I think how God gave me a garden before
He ever gave them to me, how my children play where I was buried, raised,
how my tears are not forgotten
still,

how my laughter was drawn from stiff, dry ground, how the absence of them was not the absence
of God, and I was held, am held,
holding them.

Long story short,
for them I prayed, but mostly I cried, in sackcloth and ashes
I cried,
and the LORD heard
my voice.

-S.V.F.

I hope you are well this Christmas season. If you are not, I hope you cry for help. Confide in those you trust, lean into your church body this season, fall into our Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Let your heart break there. Let there be no rush.

God is with you.

He will hear your voice.

You will be helped.

When Hope Outlasts the Holiday Spirit

In the Light We Wait, Christmas poem

Dead of Night – a gut-honest journey woven in hope, light, and assurance.