REMEMBERING MY FIRST CHRISTMAS IN FAITH

Some of you have written to me about Christmases spent alone, filled with longing. Your messages have brought to mind my first Christmas after coming to faith in 2007. I too was living alone but, that year, God had led me to meet my Boaz, Butch, and that made all the difference, even though he was thousands of miles away, in Canada, while I was in England.

Back then, my family was not in favour of the relationship.

I wrote about that Christmas day spent alone in my first book, a memoir entitled: She Does Not Fear the Snow.

My day began with prayer and devotions that filled me with an inner peace that made me feel close to God and a million miles away from Christmas tinsel and ho! ho! ho!

“Near my home, hidden away between a leafy park and a housing estate, was a wending, tree-lined track, lined by an ancient farmhouse and a row of workers’ cottages. Here, the birds sang their little hearts out, decibels louder than anywhere else, and the throbbing of cars was absent. It was like a bygone world.  

Out for a Christmas walk, alone, I noticed something floating down out of the sky, a yard or so in front of me. I had only to put out a hand for a pure white feather, delicate and pristine, to land in the palm of my leather glove. I wondered what kind of feather it was, goose down, perhaps, or the wing feather of a white dove. 

I looked up and saw only massed, grey cloud. No bird was in the sky above me. It seemed the feather had fallen from an angel’s wing…

Like a Christmas present from God, I took it as a confirmation of His Presence, a ‘hi’ like one He had sent me out of the blue the previous summer, when the wind had suddenly lifted to rifle the trees and, just as quickly, was gone. 

This time, He had given me something I could keep. I could even include a photo of the feather in my ‘Days’ montages. (I was counting down the days until Butch came by creating composite pictures in Photoshop of objects and people that were meaningful to us, composed around the number of days remaining until we would be together.) 

The feather put me in mind of the start of Forrest Gump, a movie that we both liked a lot and had recently discussed. A feather floats down, tugged this way and that by the breeze, and the stage is set for the theme of contrasting the apparent randomness of the world with the individual destinies the characters strive for. 

We had ended up talking about whether there can be free will when God has a plan for each of us. 

‘I believe it’s our call whether or not we grasp that plan,’ I told him. ‘Meeting you was an opportunity that might have been lost if I hadn’t pursued it. But I was meant to love you.’

‘God made us in His image, to love one another,’ he replied. 

It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me.

My hand closed over the gift of perfect beauty in my palm. The feather heartened me, for it seemed to confirm: You’re doing okay down there. Keep up the good work. With all the opposition surrounding me, that felt very special.”

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