CMP Review 2023-12-21

December 21, 2023

Christmas was always the best time of year. And I don’t mean because of presents. I mean because at church and at home something was different. We were closer to God, we were closer to eternity, we were closer to each other. But then somehow, some way, the moment would end. I would be back to the daily and often difficult business of growing up.

When I became a man I became wise to the pattern. I knew that the moments of Christmas would be wonderful but that they would pass. For a minute or an hour on Christmas Eve the worship would transport me to heaven. And then in a minute or an hour later I would be back to earth, back to the daily and difficult business of raising a family.

I would watch my children enter the mystery of Christmas joy. I would wonder if they too realized it was fleeting. I would wonder if there was a way to stop the clock, to hold on to the moment, to hold us all together, gazing steadily into the gaze of our Heavenly Father.

The Preacher, the son of David, wrote that God put eternity in the hearts of men. But I am finite. I came to exist at a moment in time. I experience only one moment at a time. Minutes pass by too fast for me to hold onto them. The love, the joy passes through my fingers before it’s mine.

But God has always been. There was never a time without Him. Every moment is in His sight and securely in His grasp. And two thousand years ago something wonderful happened. The infinite became finite. The Creator entered His creation. God became man.

If the infinite can become finite, then perhaps the finite can become infinite. Though I have a beginning perhaps I don’t have an end. Perhaps eternity is in my heart because eternity is in my future. Perhaps the best moments of Christmas joy are the sign of a joy that will last forever.

If Jesus hadn’t come, I couldn’t know for sure. But He did come. So I can.

@artmiddlekauff