For many years, I dreaded the coming of Indiana winter, with its frigid temperatures and weighted blanket of snow-covered depression. My husband’s absolute favorite season is always fall, but I could never fully enjoy it because I was bracing myself for the season that would follow.

Recently, however, as I’ve become more attuned to the rhythmic patterns of my life and my desire for ritual and presence, the practice of marking the changing of seasons has taken on new meaning. Just as I have come to appreciate suffering and loss, I have come to appreciate winter. Maybe it’s my own separation from the majority of my biological family at an early age that led me to this life so marked by sorrow. Maybe it’s the ongoing heartache I feel as a birth mother that I now understand cannot be tidily resolved. Maybe melancholy would have been gifted to me regardless. Either way, I have developed a deeper appreciation for the things that make this life painful and imperfect.

Many of us likely interpret life through the lens of simply life and death: a thing is either living or dead. Life is at the start, and death at the end. But in observing the seasons around us, the pattern of nature, instead, seems to be life, death, then life again. Life, death, new life. This eternal cycle of transformation, renewal, hope, and resurrection and new birth invites us to trust—that spring comes after winter, that the sun will rise again in the morning, that after the seed falls and is buried, it will spring up into something life-giving. Through literal or symbolic deaths experienced throughout our lives, we inch closer to deeper wisdom. Through attunement to acts of birth and death, we become attuned to what is trying to come forth in our lives, and what is ready to be put to rest. It is with this wisdom that the happenings of our lives can be reframed, now as pieces of a greater and more universal story ever at play.

As a Christian, I can see how Advent is rich in this archetypal imagery. The four weeks of advent have more in common with all of creation around us than the bustling cheer and consumerism I find myself given to as a parent to four at home. One of the first advent books we read together as a family was ‘All Creation Waits’ by Gayle Boss, where each day is a look into the survival behavior and physiological changes of different animals during the winter. Whether they are hibernating or venturing out every day to find food, each creature depends on its ability to adapt to winter’s darkness and scarcity. Amazingly, they are wonderfully and uniquely designed to do exactly that.

Our ancestors partook in the same adaptation—through the storing of fall’s harvest, the preparation for the long stretch of winter, the rationing of food, and the eventual communal feasting to celebrate the return of the sun and the birth of God with us. 

Advent, then, is a period of fasting, giving, and praying, a practice of wide-awakeness to the ways in which we are not in control, the ways in which life, and death, and new life, happen to us all. Advent shines a light on our fear of the dark and on our longing for something more.

This eyes-wide-open-to-reality is the gift of winter, as it is the gift of loss. It is not only that I wish for reconciliation and a deeper connection with my first son, it is that this heartbreak is yet another symbol of disconnect, of separation in this world. In this way, my unique longing as a birth mother is only a microcosm of the longing of all humanity.

Our human hurt won’t be fixed by getting that perfectly harmonious relationship with our families, free of hurt or insecurity or tension, because this world is still a world marked by seasons of darkness, division, suffering, and loss. This world is still incomplete. But the message of the incarnation is one of hope, pointing to something greater at the end of this longing, with Someone guiding the way.

When we tap into the root system of yearning under our individual shoot of hurt, we touch a broader picture of calling. We see that our pain is an invitation to participation. Regardless of our religious belief, our yearning for harmony, wholeness, union, and peace reveals a posture of our reaching for the heavens. Reaching for the perfect in the midst of this imperfect. It’s our pain which opens us to what could be.

I’m reminded of the Sufi saying:

This longing you express

is the return message

In our ache is the answer.

Our ache similarly fosters compassion for others, for our shared humanity, despite superficial differences—as the word compassion means ‘to suffer with.’ It strikes me that God seeing our suffering and choosing to enter into it is truly compassion in action. It was his act of reaching down into the imperfection, of foreshadowing the union of the perfect with the imperfect. As a Christian, this rich imagery moves me to be a part of such a vision during this in-between life. How can I create little acts to bring heaven down? How can I suffer with? How can I join the collective act of renewal? How can I reach for more unity, rather than inflict more division, and so honor the deepest longings of humanity? This vision is not passive but compels us to contemplative action rooted in a desire for restoration.

We all suffer loss. We all have our own doorways into the darkness. Adoption has not been my only door, but it has been the one I know best right now, knowing others are in store as I age. While part of the paradox of life is that it requires both acceptance and action, I know that wherever I’ve been and whatever may come point to something greater than just me, my first son, and my family with its collection of hurts and healing. Like some honeybees who are born and die within the winter season, never seeing the light of day, never experiencing flight, it may be that for some of us, our strongest hopes for our relationships impacted by adoption will never materialize here. And yet our hope transcends the material. Through relationship with one another we find healing; through community, we find purpose; together we act in hope for a greater collective future, whether or not we personally will see the fruit. In our joys and in our losses, in the darkness and in the new light, we are all part of the unfolding of a greater story.