By GRACE SHAW
A few weeks ago, a friend shared for KING & COUNTRY’s new music video “Little Drummer Boy” with me.
“It’s so beautiful,” she wrote. “You will love it!”
If Little Drummer Boy is your favorite Christmas carol, I apologize for my initial lack of enthusiasm. For me, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Little Drummer Boy is a scene from The Office where Angela Martin, the puritanical accountant, awkwardly karaoke’s to the song during Dunder Mifflin’s company Christmas party—not a very profound association.
Later that week, I still hadn’t opened the video link when this friend and I talked on the phone.
“You haven’t watched it yet!?”
“No,” I confessed, explaining that the Angela Martin association had initially turned me off.
“You really need to watch it,” she said. “I cried, Grace. It has a little boy carrying a drum that’s way too big for him and leading all of these grown-ups to the manger.”
Because she insisted, I watched.
She was right. I wept watching it. The video follows a little boy, struggling to carry a drum as big as he is—over mountains, through the desert, across battle fields—with grown men following behind him. A couple of times throughout, he stops. Exhausted, he looks back, silently asking what the adults have to say about the direction they should go. Each time, they signal him to keep leading. They follow him all the way to the manger, where he kneels down and lays his drum on the ground before Jesus.
If my tears could have spoken, I think they were saying: “The way has been long. Your drum is heavy. The gifts that are yours to bring have felt like burdens. You are weary of looking over your shoulder for direction only to be pointed onward.”
Maybe you, too, have experienced something like this. The gifts and talents with which God has entrusted us can feel, at times, like burdens we cannot carry forward another step—like drums as big as we are that we struggle to play as we climb mountains, cross deserts, and duck past the shrapnel of life’s battlefields. How much heavier, too, when we feel we must make our way alone in the only direction available to us: onward.
• • •
Nearly two years ago, I made the decision to take a job in Washington D.C. away from family, friends, and all that was familiar to me. More fears and uncertainties than I could count loomed in the wake of my decision, and one evening I came across the passage in John 14 where Jesus says: “There are many rooms in my Father’s house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. If it were not so, I would tell you plainly. When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.”
This was a deep comfort to my soul, until I read what Jesus said next: “You know where I am going, and how to get there.”
Thankfully, Thomas said exactly what I was thinking: “No, we don’t know, Lord. We haven’t any idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
I think Thomas and I were on the same page. As I thought about my move, I wanted to know where I would live, who my friends would be, and a timeline for when I would feel at home in a strange, new place. Perhaps Thomas, too, had hoped Jesus would give him a roadmap with key landmarks, clear directions, and an ETA for when he would arrive home to the place the Father had prepared for him.
But Jesus replied: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Jesus is the way. We might not get our roadmap, but like a child who just wants to be with their parent, we get to be with Jesus. Wherever he is, there we are. Both like and unlike the little drummer boy, we may experience burdensome journeys in this lifetime, but we are never alone on the way to Jesus. We cannot walk the way home without him, because he is the way home.
I know I have struggled to carry my drum. Maybe you have too. Yet I am reminded through the gift of the Incarnation this Advent how sweet it is that onward to Jesus is now, and will always be, onward with Jesus.