All around me – lights beaming, gaily decorating trees and
buildings; familiar carols resounding on the public radio station;
reconnecting with family and friends – the Winter Solstice soon
upon us never fails to rev me up.
“Fast away the old
year passes . . .”
We attended a pageant celebrating Christmas, hosted by the
tutorial overseeing our grandchildren’s schooling. Children’s sweet faces and
voices, their earnest performances – expressing the hope and joy of the season:
God so loved us He gave us His Son.
But, like so many Christmases past, the brilliance of the
season, both secular and sacred, contrasts with the dark reality of disease,
despair and depravity. MS and cancer haven’t taken the holiday off – nor has
the anger and dysfunction, disrupting too many families disappeared just
because it’s Christmas.
Life hurts!
And if the pain of living were not enough, a few people have
figured out how to silence those who object to their conduct, which defies God.
Folks, all for whom that Baby came, whose political correctness reacts
and punishes a Christian’s comment on the obvious, do nothing when their
government rewards itself at the expense of those who fought to protect its
citizens. (Are
We That Cruel?) All the lights of the season do not seem to illuminate our
minds to see how dark the darkness is. (The Culture
of Death, continued)
Bah-Hug!
Making sense of suffering, I can’t, apart from the hope that
an infinite personal God chose to involve Himself in the world and lives of all
He created.
I
believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all
the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful
mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small
Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal
harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all
hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the
crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed, that it will make it not
only possible to forgive but to justify
all that has happened. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The
Brothers Karamazov, chapter 34. Cited by Tim Keller, Walking
with God through Pain and Suffering, page 154.)
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| Morning Has Broken |
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