Yesterday I received a wonderful email containing a tribute by a pastor and his church to the pastor's wife. She died a few months ago. She was beloved by so many. One of the messages, by the pastor himself, made it abundantly clear that he felt the years he was able to spend with his wife was a gift from God, and that SHE was a gift. And it made me think again -- only in a more vivid way than usual -- that that is the way I experience living with my own wife God has given me.

The pastor used a term to describe the best that life in the church, the Body of Christ, has to offer. He said that living in Christ with others is to "experience the impossible." That phrase really struck me as not only true, but a good way of explaining something that I find hard to explain. When I gave a sermon recently on the spiritual gift/fruit of "joy," I was trying to get to that point. There are various ways that the leaders of the early Christian church sought to describe the difference living a life in Christ can make: "Abudant life" (John 10:10) "Eternal life" (living it now before heaven -- see John 17:3), and Paul's admonition to Timothy to take hold of "the life that really is life." (1st Timothy 6:19) These are just a few examples.

I know I myself have lived my life at times as if one shouldn't expect much from it -- take the popularity of Murphy's Law for instance -- "anything that can go wrong will go wrong." But today we live -- compared to even 20 years ago -- in a highly UN-sentimental age, a very cynical age, where clowns make you think of John Wayne Gacy, where priests take advantage of little boys, where a favorite word used to critique certain things that are "too positive" nowadays is the word "cheesy," where a piece of journalism that calls attention to what is working well today is called a "puff-piece," or a piece of "feel-good journalism." I came across someone recently writing that he is receiving too much good news, "so many 'points of light' that one eventually becomes inured [too used to] them." So let's turn an old saying inside out. Instead of "no news is good news," it's "good news is no news."

The whole thrust of the most common attitude today is that any good thing must be a fake thing, that the only real things the bad news we hear out there. Now I don't doubt that there really is bad news, and sometimes a lot of it. And it's often important to dig up and know such things, it really is. But it's not the whole truth. The darkness around us cannot squelch the light. Love really does exist in this world, and God is behind all that love.

Of course there were other ages in the past where cynicism ruled the day. One of those happened to be when Jesus was walking around, teaching and healing and preaching. Because of the age He dwelled in, it really struck people when He said, "With God, nothing is impossible." (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 18:27) Jesus withstood the cynical laughter of professional mourners when He told them He was about to raise a young girl from the dead. He ignored the discples when they said it was impossible for Him to experience the faithful touch of one sick old lady in the midst of dozens touching Him at the same time...just to name a few examples.

Often when I am counseling someone who has had a very difficult childhood, I find that the greatest difficulty they face is that when they were children they did not perceive that they were really loved and accepted for who they were (whether they were or not, I don't know, God knows; but doubtless some really weren't loved by their parents). It's like they grew up in one world, and do not know how to get to the other world, the world of love. The main difficulty is not their upbringing, as terrible as that was, the difficulty now is that they don't believe there IS another world out there, another kind of experience, when there really is one. What is oftentimes the best that Christmas offers to us is a time to take a stand FOR that other, spiritual reality -- to say that the world of faith and unconditional love really DOES exist...and that a bunch of people (Christians) are not making this up.

My cousin Dan and his wife Julia captured this truth well in their recent email sent from their ministry in Dohuk, Iraq. They are new missionaries there and are experiencing both some personal disappointments and ministerial challenges. And yet they boldly proclaim: "It's so easy to find opportunities to complain about the ridiculous things about this culture, the school [in Dohuk where they teach], and the people around us. But we know from the Christmas story that God often glorifies Himself through things that, from the world's viewpoint seem unimpressive or ridiculous. Yet when we only see the ridiculous and we're not looking for the ways God might be glorifying Himself, it's so easy to become lofty in our worldly opinions." Amen.

It's so easy to paint the world as too messy for us and then step away from loving it. Sometimes, I confess, I have done just that. But that comes from a lack of faith in God, for as God has shown at Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, not only is nothing impossible with God...in faith, everything good is very, very possible, true, and real. Blessed Christmas to you!