Christmas is Fake.

Christmas is Fake.  There are lights—and annoying green wires.  There are pretty Christmas trees—and an agonizing trip to pick one out a Homedepo.  Christmas Eve service?—broken projector, singing to CD, candles burning your hand, and a lot of awkward hugs.

Christmas is something we do.  We play our part.  We survive Christmas.

But on December 24, 2011, there are also things quite real.  The fear of 2012 (not because I think the world is imploding), the life this year has brought, and an uncanny process of tomorrow.  It’s all in future and past, yet so, so, real. 

Beyond the fuzzy, and the feeling, there is oddly love and God.

Love and God.

Aren’t they supposed to be fuzzy?  Aren’t they supposed to make us feel happy and warm and carefree?  They do.  But in the misted of fake and fuzzy of Santamas, the invisible and strange God is something of a comfort.  My fights with God can wait for tomorrow, I’m quite happy to know we can have them.  I’m happy to marvel at the story I find myself written into, into the life I never thought mine to live.

A good writer tells a story, where the only glorifying they make of themselves is how invisible they are.  How through their witty narratives, effortless romances, and twisting plots in the end the reader is in love with the characters.  In turn the love for the writer is different. This love is a knowing.  As we read the pages of a skillfully crafted work the uncanny feeling that we have walked a path cut for us.  That we know the writer by his words and yet he knows us because we have read them.  There is the strange feeling the writer understands us, because we understand him, or rather, he has understood us because he has helped us to understand him.  Much more it is the memory, the love of the revisited pages bringing us back to old places.  We love these memories—stories—and yet it’s ease makes it harder to appreciate the triple edit, the quibble over a single word, the crafting, editing, plight of the writer.  And that is his glory.

Of God and love,

Nothing more kind,

nothing more good.

A kindness,

A grace

--compassion!

To walk a great road

and

to not walk alone.