Christmas Post #2

I feel like I'm the type of person who seems spontaneous, but sometimes I feel like that's just a clever disguise, a calculated social illusion that I work hard to maintain. In the inner reality of what goes on at the heart of me often I feel very plotted out, very measured. I want to live wildly, passionately, recklessly moving in the paths God clears at a moments notice, but somehow that gets drowned in a thousand other pulls and demands and real world stuff: running errands, paying bills, slowly struggling under the countless, tiny worries and fears that often go hand in hand with simply waking up in the morning and trying to do what seems best with my life; what makes sense.

Thinking about this desire to live differently, to actually be available and ready to, as Timothy says "...take hold of the life that is truly life." makes me think about this Chistmas, and Christ's birth and Christ's promise to come again; about how wild and reckless it all was on that night in Bethlehem and how wild and reckless it all will be someday again. And also how the seeming spontaneity and thunder of Christ's birth is tempered with something solid as bedrock because it is, in the same instant wild and reckless and yet incredibly anticipated, waited for, desired. I love getting glimpses of this and remembering that there really is some solid canvas behind all the vivid colors and splashes that make up the picture of Christ's messy, seemingly ill timed manger birth.

I don't know what any of this means really but it leaves me with hope for my weary heart and reminds me that I am also a son of this God who recklessly unfolds things that he has anticipated for millennia. On some level it's both weird and comforting to think that he anticipates, longs for and rejoices in the fruition of moments in my life, even if it's as simple as the second my eyes open to start another day.

Here's the poem that sparked some of this for me. Let me just say that I love Madeleine L'Engle.

The Irrational Season
by Madeleine L'Engle

This is the irrational season,
When love blooms, bright and wild;
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.