Merry Christmas from the Drennan Family

This is what I put together for our Christmas letter this year. It was slightly painful to write, but it was so good for my heart to reflect on the past year, to where our hearts were when the year started to where they are now - remembering that through it all God is so good! So incredibly grateful for the birth of Jesus. Merry Christmas from our family to yours!

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m tucked away in my bed with a sleeping babe beside me in his, and there are about 1,000 other things I could be doing, but I am forcing myself to just sit in the stillness of this space. And I find that when I just sit, I can’t stop the tears from flowing. The truth is, this year has felt so hard and so incredibly heavy. And when I stop to think about all that we’ve walked through this past year it feels so overwhelming. 2017 felt hard and heavy with a job loss, a pregnancy loss, and Peter’s fall down a mountain, and I think we naively thought we’d reached the summit of hard things and 2018 would look different! Yet, little did we know the lessons learned in 2017 were simply God’s way of preparing us for what was to come for our family in 2018.

When this year began, I never would have envisioned it would play out the way it did with both my grandmas dying within a week of each other, with our son, Conor, arriving three months early, weighing in at just 1 lb 10 oz., with the recovery from an emergency c-section, with the lengthy hospital stay for both of us and the endless doctor’s appointments and the feeding issues and the reflux, and on and on it goes, not to mention trying to manage the rest of life and two other children. I never envisioned this dramatic birth story or that I’d wait 12 days before I’d feel the weight of my son on my chest and 97 days until we’d bring him home, and even then I never envisioned we’d bring him home with a feeding tube and oxygen support. This isn’t the story I envisioned as I dreamt of the transition to three kids. This is most definitely not the story I would have written. And on the days when I ask, why Lord? Why us? Why Conor? Why this? I hear the Lord saying, remember. Remember what we have walked through together. Remember how I have used you. Remember I am the one writing this story. Trust that I will use it and I will redeem it just as I have done before.

And I do. I remember. I remember that those hard moments have been some of the most beautiful moments of true surrender as we laid all our broken pieces at the Lord’s feet. And I sit here in awe at the way He picked them up and pieced them back together, all the while lacing those hard moments with moments of sheer joy as we marveled at Conor’s growth and the capability of modern medicine, as we laughed at Ryan’s jokes and his silly faces and sheer stubbornness (some days this doesn’t make me laugh), as we all walked Jack to his first day of Kindergarten and sent him out into the world (so proud of this kid!), and as I reveled at the depth of my husband’s love for all of us.

This year was a year of remembering, of remembering where we have been and where the Lord has brought us in our own transformation and true surrender, and remembering and trusting that even amidst the heavy and the hard, He is present and He is good. Our hope and prayer is that we can live each day fully surrendered to Him, trusting in the story that He is writing for our family, and for each of you, knowing that we may walk through heavy and hard things, but it will all be good because He is good.

May you see and experience the goodness of Christ this season and always!