The Shaking
I felt like I was herding cats. The hands of my kids (ages two, four, and seven) were moving faster than I could manage. My husband was at home in bed resting, and there I was at my parents’ house trying to make Christmas cookies with my children. I wanted to teach them how you carefully place each cookie cutter near the edge to get the most out of the dough. Instead, cookie cutters were haphazardly smooshed wherever their hearts desired. I was frantically jumping in as cut pieces of dough were carelessly picked up and thrown onto the cookie sheet. Stars were misshaped. Hearts were squished. Gingerbread men were losing their heads. I was about to lose my mind.
That was how I felt about my life right then: I was frantically trying to manage it all, but I couldn’t. Balls kept dropping. Everything seemed out of my control. I could not hold it all together—not even the poor gingerbread men.
That was a year of shaking for me. I felt God shaking me as the waves of hardship, trials, setbacks, and unknowns continued to pound. With each wave, things began spilling out of me, and they weren’t pretty. The shaking revealed the ugly sin in my heart. Until those days, I had fancied myself a “good girl.” But as my trials continued, God continued to shake out of me what could be shaken—all for the purpose of showing me what cannot be shaken.
At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Hebrews 12:26–27
That Christmas began to reveal to me how much value I had placed on the events and traditions of Christmas over the Author of Christmas. It reminded me that He is sovereign over it all. It reminded me that He does not ask me to hold everything together; He is already doing that. It reminded me that I do not need to know the future; I need to remember that He goes before me and behind me. He hems me in.
Instead, He asks me to throw off all that hinders me; to let go of the weights that hold me down and run with endurance after Him (Hebrews 12:1–2). Sometimes throwing off what hinders me comes at the hands of trials. It comes in times of suffering. It comes with shaking.
I have a love-hate relationship with the word endurance, but we are called to it (or your version may say perseverance) over and over in Scripture. The Greek word for endurance means “steadfast, patiently waiting.”2 It comes from two root words meaning “under” and “remain”.
I don’t want to stay under. I want to bypass the hurt. I want to skirt around the pain. I want to get out from under the hardships. But that’s not what we are called to do. Like the old children’s story tells us, we can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We can’t go around it. We have to go through it. The only way through is through. But God continues to use these hardships to grow me, to build endurance, to refine my character; and the result is hope (Romans 5:3–5). That’s what Christmas is all about: hope. Not a wish or a flimsy desire or something arbitrary. It’s that Hebrews 6, sure and steadfast hope—hope that does not disappoint or put us to shame. Hope that one day, we will be in eternity with Christ. There will be no more tears or death or mourning or weeping or pain. Hope that all things will be made new. God will dwell with us and us with Him.
What remains true and what cannot be shaken are the things of God. What a glorious promise! And, as the author of Hebrews says, our response is worship. We are grateful. We are in awe of our God, who made a way through Jesus for us to receive that which is unchanging and unmovable and unshakable (Hebrews 12:28–29). And let’s face it: we were going to bite the head of the gingerbread man off anyway.
