My favorite words from the Word at Christmastime come from the Apostle John at the beginning of his gospel. In just a few sentences, John declares an unfathomable truth - the Word became flesh to dwell among us. But what might come across to us as a beautiful and eloquent introduction to John’s gospel is actually more like a verbal hand grenade. You and I stand far removed from the people who first received John’s gospel, and the chasms of time and culture have deadened the punch. But the power of these verses still rumbles just under the surface.

Seasons of wading into the rubble and rebuilding must happen if we’re going to survive, let alone thrive for God’s purposes. God knows it. He does it in and through us. As the hammer flies and the new structure takes shape, we pray for a quick, efficient, and orderly finish. After everything we’ve been through, can’t THIS, at least, come easy?

Lesson One on rebuilding God’s way: we have to look back to see what went right and what went wrong before it all fell apart. Using what we learn in looking back, we should carefully choose what seeds to plant as we rebuild. It would simply make no sense to just clean things up and try everything all over again the exact same way, expecting different results. That is the definition of insanity, you know. Sure, life is messy and will always need a clean up on this side of heaven, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn and rebuild better and better each time.

I’m in a bit of a fumble. As in tripping and falling and getting a bit scraped up on the way down. It’s just that kind of season, and I’m don’t have the energy to pretend that it’s not. You, too? Yeah…as they like to say in the commercials, we’re all in this together. But could we fumble forward towards faith instead of completely dropping the ball? When we find ourselves stumbling, even flat on our faces, can we still find that we’ve moved closer to God instead of away from Him?

There’s danger in our silence, our reluctance to engage in the painful process of lament and the hard work of calling out injustice. When we sigh into the reflection and then walk away, we show the world an unruly mess, undermining our credibility as God’s reflections and followers of Jesus. We can’t just leave it alone or wait for others to untangle the mess.

I bet I’m not the only one with questions for God these days. The stormy season we’re in makes it hard to find God, let alone understand what’s He’s up to or where He is.

But, everything Jesus says and does centers on this one goal: helping people know Him. That’s the eye of whatever storm we face. It’s the place of calm and serenity that makes even a modicum of sense in the middle of the crazies and the pain and the “what-the-crap, Lord?” happening all around us. The louder the storm, the greater the opportunity to know Him for ourselves. And the only way to get to that center, that eye of the storm, is through it.

I’m not going to do Bible “study” anymore. I’m going Bible diving instead.

I want to pack on my Bible tools with all the skills I can muster and jump on into God’s Word. I want to immerse myself in the context as best as I can, enveloping as many of my senses as I can manage into that environment. I want to explore and breathe and encounter that world, feel it live and move all around me. And I want to come back with treasures in my hands and Living Water in my hair, and let it make a mess all over the floor of my world. I want to dive deep, explore long, and come back changed. And I want you to come, too.

Some of us are Bible Zombies, unconnected to the life giving Word of God. Such people have no real life energizing them inside or flowing to others around them. They’re alive in the sense that they believe in Jesus and are saved, but their hearts aren’t connected to His cleansing, shaping, and sustaining power, so their walk with God drags lifelessly along. Their faith doesn’t don’t grow much, if at all, from the time they first believed. And they look a lot like they did when they were spiritually dead without Him.

When we face giants on our path — real, live, everyone-can-see-them giants — we can learn the lesson God’s people learned the hard way. If we try to turn back to where we came from, we’ll forfeit the amazing place God has prepared for us, and we’ll spend our days wandering in the dusty, gritty wilderness. God in His grace might choose to give us another chance someday, but He might not. That’s up to Him. The choice to move forward or turn back is up to us.

It’s official. 2019 lies behind us and 2020 stretches out wide towards a new horizon. Forget turning the page on the calendar. It’s time to take the old one down and put up something brand new. Many of us mark the New Year with all manners of self-reflection and fresh commitments, as if we can wipe our slates clean of what last year leaves behind and start from scratch. We can’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean the practice isn’t valuable. Anytime we pause to assess where we are and where we’re going, I think it’s a good thing. Personally, I choose a word-of-the-year to focus and reflect on as the New Year begins. And so I’ve been thinking….

I think I need more practice believing that God is truly with me, but the story of Jesus’ birth at Christmastime helps. When I doubt and I’m feeling a bit left alone, I think back to the baby’s cry in the night, the miracle of God’s promise kept against all odds. I remember how far He had to come to be with us as one of us, to live among common people without the advantages of wealth and fame, and to suffer all the things you and I suffer in this broken world. I know the Christmas story is true. Therefore, I know that it’s also true that God is with me.

It’s as simple as that.

Often when I’m trying to be grateful for the life I have, I find myself with my eyes to the earth. I look around me and try to name each and every thing I can thank God for, which is everything. It’s a good practice, to be sure, and one that can occupy me for the rest of time. But I’ve got a different approach in mind today, one I hope will fix my eyes on something higher than what I see around me. Instead of focusing on the stuff I’m thankful for, I want to focus on the Someone who gives it all. God is the Giver, and so I’m thinking of framing my gratitude in terms of Who He Is instead of what He’s given. It’s a subtle shift, and not one that’s necessarily better or more holy than any other approach. I just like the idea of keeping my eyes up on Him when I give thanks. So I’m organizing my thankful thoughts in terms of the One who was, who is, and who is to come.

I never thought I was the only one dealing with this particular struggle, but the response I got to my confession overwhelmed me. I didn’t wake up that morning feeling particularly brave. I only intended to answer an honest question honestly. In an attempt to be authentic and accept the offered prayers of my sisters, I just laid it all out there.

And my long-held suspicions were confirmed. God writes his stories in our lives in personal ways, but doesn’t necessarily intend for them to be private.

I’m appalled at the caustic conversation so many Christians have taken up. In public. Professional and professing Christians alike chimed in, taking sides, launching verbal attacks, lobbing “truth” bombs over the gender divide. And that’s they way our society works, especially in the saturation of social media. We all say what’s on our minds, and blast it out there for the world to see, unfiltered and unconcerned for the consequences.

Brothers and sisters, we must do better.

Do you ever feel like God designates some folks to have roller-coaster rides in life instead of steady journeys? That certain people attract drama and stress all the time? Ever feel like you’re one of those people? When we’re on the roller coaster ride of uncertainty, we can choose to pray one of two ways. We can ask God to give us information, or we can ask him to give us passion for our destination.

Y’all. I’m dead serious. My friend’s precious four-year-old posited this gem to his grandmother, who forwarded it to his mom, who quoted it to me. I mean, what else are you going to do with such cuteness? We chuckled long and loud, and then tried to figure out what prompted the crazy question in the first place. Apparently, his engineer father has been reading to his boy from the book Newtonian Physics for Babies (yes, there is such a thing), so the kid legit understands what aerodynamic means. But why he wondered if babies might or might not have such a quality is beyond me.

My performance-and-results-oriented filter goes haywire when I read Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13 of the farmer sowing his seed. He’s a lousy farmer. Just look at him tossing seeds willy nilly all over the place with no care for the kind of soil they might land on. But rather than being concerned with results, Jesus says we should scatter the seed everywhere we go and let the soil be responsible for the outcome.

You would think after applying makeup to basically the same face (mine) for the past three decades that I’d have certain skills down pat by now. That muscle memory would somehow kick in. That however minuscule each individual improvement might be, the cumulative effect over a long period of time would be some level of expertise.

And yet I still can’t put my eyeliner on straight.

I’ve got so many things other than eyeliner that I also think I should be better at by now. Basic stuff… You’d think after a few decades of following Jesus around, I’d do a better job on these things. And yet, I still manage to stray from the path He lays out for me, dipping down into spaces I’m not supposed to go and generally making a mess. I try to clean it up. I try to cover up the mistake. I certainly hope no one will notice. But I notice, and I just think I should be better at this by now.