A Blue Christmas
By: Rev. George Hull
Editor, The Pastoral Report
The unfolding, in the ordinary patterns of life and love, of separation.
There’s something about the holidays that brings things into sharp relief.
The familiar background music of the season.
Pies baked from recipes written on the heart.
Gifts carefully chosen, especially wrapped, one by one.
And yet this year is not like the last.
There is a silence now that makes itself known.
It carries the shape of a relationship that once was.
Caught off guard, memories surface—
of lives lived side by side—
and the troubled heart flounders.
Loss comes to us in ways we are unprepared for.
The death of a loved companion.
Or the quiet fraying of the life you thought you were living.
Things that once felt effortless now demand more of us.
Grief seasons the moment and asks us to meet it head-on.
To recognize the pain of absence as love.
To honor the spaces in between,
the hollow places in life that still hold meaning.
The holidays will be different.
The light of this season casts a long shadow.
Carry the ache.
Carry the memory.
This is how the heart keeps living.
