What are you looking for?

My wife and I recently spent an evening out discussing our childhood memories of the holiday season. I didn’t have much to share. I am an only child raised by a single mother, so the discussion of Christmas tradition is a short one with me. One year, I remember convincing my mother to leave the decorations in the back of the closet. I didn’t feel like retrieving them and the fuss wasn’t worth livening up a house for two. She still regrets that one. As a member of a small family who put very little thought or preparation into the Christmas season, it’s not a surprise that we got very little out of it. The season consisted of a few presents, an artificial tree, and visits with rarely-seen family members. Rinse, repeat. One year my mother wanted to inject some meaning into the holiday, and it’s the only memory that stands out for me. I remember complaining when my mother said we were going to read the Bible before opening presents. Specifically, we read about the birth of Jesus. I was anxious to unwrap new toys, I’m sure, but I remember sitting there as a frustrated adolescent while my mother opened the scriptures and read aloud the birth narrative. Fast forward several years. My wife and I are now awaiting a birth of our own. We’re just a few weeks away from the arrival of our baby boy. For the last several months, we’ve endured a wide range of emotions, asked questions, considered names, asked more questions, discussed parenting techniques, and prepared our home. We have painted and rearranged, registered and unwrapped, laughed and cried. We have inhabited our own advent season. Advent is the term that the church ascribes to the four weeks before Christmas, but it’s not a religious term. Advent is the Anglicanized form of the latin word “adventus,” which means “arrival” or “coming.” It is the preparation—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—for an arrival of someone or something. The term is often linked to the ancient Roman world where Caesar or a dignitary would visit a region, and the town would spring into action to make way for the arrival of the heralded figure. However, adventus in the ancient world was proportional to how the person arriving was regarded. Adventus could refer to a spouse coming home, a visit from a neighbor, or the arrival of a royal figure. Adventus is not defined by pageantry; instead, it’s one part of the spectrum. For years, my wife and I have largely stuck to the same familial script that I grew up with. Since it’s just the two of us, we often drive several hours to spend time with family. Some years we’ve had to take to the road on Christmas Day just to make appearances in multiple places. The result is a hurried season, an advent without any reflection or celebration. Consequently, the arrival of Christmas came and went, just like it always has. A season without meaning. A season of going through the motions. Our hope is different with our new arrival. For the first time, we’re realizing what it actually means to await the arrival of a baby boy. The Advent story resonates in a deeper way, knowing some of the emotions that must have been present within Joseph and Mary. The nerves, the anxiety, the excitement, the joys, the fears. They’re present with us as well. We’re also ready to bring meaning into the season as we carve out new family traditions. Adventus hasn’t changed since the early tradition; the arrival is as meaningful as you make it. I don’t believe this is about guilt or an attempt to force meaning into the season. The birth of Jesus has been a freely given gift from the beginning, and any attempts to inject meaning for the sake of religion is empty and meaningless. Instead, I believe this is an invitation to realize that the Advent season can envelop you as you wait with hope—or it can slip right by if you are not prepared. May we allow ourselves to breathe in this hurried season, may the familiar come alive in new, vibrant ways, and may we prepare the way for the Lord to fill our lives with love, peace, and joy this Advent season. #Advent

There’s no doubt that the Rabbit Room is full of my people, but I haven’t always known who my people were. The first time I found my people, I was in eighth grade. I didn’t know they were my people at first, I just knew I’d finally found human beings who said out loud the things I was thinking. Looking back now, I can see that those people were more important than I ever realized back then. In the back of the room where our church youth group met, there was a smaller room. And in that smaller room, the arcane was made real. It was my wardrobe, but inside, instead of fur coats, I found a soundboard and lighting controls. Instead of snowy woods, I found the buttons that controlled everything—the music, the microphones, the lights. The characters who occupied that room were like deities to me because they knew what the buttons did when you pushed them and because they got to choose which music played as everyone else walked into the larger room. These guys would fit so well in the Rabbit Room. One that sticks out to me was Chip, one of the adult leaders. Chip was fond of dressing in knee-high leather boots and a kilt, and he would sometimes have a Highlander sword slung on his back. For a 13-year-old, these things make an impression. In that tiny room, guys like Chip introduced me to bands like The Seventy-Sevens, and singers like Mark Heard and Steve Taylor. For a kid who grew up exclusively on Contemporary Christian Music with a little bit of the oldies station for good measure, I wasn’t used to this. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, when names like Michael W. Smith and Sandi Patty ruled the Southern Baptist music dial, I had no idea this other musical world existed. Oh, I knew there were bands like Petra—Christian music’s answer to Bon Jovi—but I wasn’t allowed to listen to them. That was too “hard.” But mostly, I needed music that asked difficult questions: “What about social justice?” “What if I’m not sure about what I believe?” “What about sin?” I’m thankful for the CCM artists that filled my cassette rack back then. They gave me a vocabulary for my faith. But I really needed to move past musical Christianity 101 and look toward something that would help me know how to live; something to convince me that I wasn’t alone. Enter Steve Taylor, a Christian music iconoclast. Steve Taylor’s music is a mash-up of pop, rock, and punk sensibilities (in attitude, if not in sound). It’s a hard sound to categorize because it’s not unusual to find reggae, rap, and hard rock on the same album. What’s unique about Steve Taylor (this was especially true in the ’80s and ’90s) is that you never knew what he would do next. I was a little late to Steve Taylor’s game, but that just made the findings richer indeed. Instead of having to wait for new releases, I had the pleasure of digging through the shelves at Long’s Christian Bookstore in Orlando and buying everything my allowance would pay for. And as I talked with people about Steve Taylor, I began to hear the stories: Have you heard ‘I Blew Up the Clinic Real Good?’ The satirical song about people who blow up abortion clinics? Have you heard his song about racism at Bob Jones University? He’s banned from that campus for life! Have you seen the video for Meltdown? It’s got Blair from The Facts of Life in it! This stuff was mind-blowing for me. But beyond the controversial topics, what always impacted me about Steve Taylor’s music was how he talked about things that mattered to me. Things I’d never heard put to music before. He criticized the idea that all Christians have to look, think, and feel exactly the same in “I Want to Be a Clone” (“Cloneliness is next to godliness, right?”). He made me look differently at the public figures I was idolizing in “Hero.” He made me see that “Jesus is for Losers.” And mostly, he made me feel all right about the doubt that I’ve always carried. Belief was never easy for me (it still isn’t), but judging by the other Christian music I’d been hearing, this was my own personal flaw. I was an oddball. Everyone else got this belief thing with no trouble. My favorite Steve Taylor song was and is “Harder to Believe Than Not To” because it gives voice to what I was thinking (watch the video). I held on to those songs for dear life. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when a Kickstarter campaign for Steve Taylor & the Perfect Foil’s new album was launched. On one hand, it was Christmas come early for me, I’ve been awaiting new tunes from him for twenty years. But on the other, some things bubbled back up to the surface. Since the Kickstarter announcement, I’ve spent a lot of time with Now the Truth Can Be Told, the two-disc collection of Steve Taylor’s work, and I can see how far I’ve come. Now, instead of my people being limited to that small sound booth, they’re here, in The Rabbit Room. Now I’m surrounded by people who say out loud the things I’ve always thought. My people have grown from five to five hundred. And if it weren’t for Steve Taylor, Mark Heard, The Vigilantes of Love, The Seventy-Sevens, Daniel Amos, The Prayer Chain, Poor Old Lu, and on and on and on, I don’t think I’d ever have had the guts to become a part of this place. I’m eternally grateful to all of them for teaching me that belief isn’t easy for a lot of us. I’m grateful for their voices telling me that I’m not alone.

[Editor’s note: On Friday we released a new song by Ron Block, Jeff Taylor, and Rebecca Reynolds (also featuring Julie Lee). Rebecca, the co-writer of the song, also wrote this companion piece. It’s well worth your time.] I wish I could tell you that I never have any doubts about God, but trust seems to run strongest in the very young and the very old in faith, and I am neither. When I say that I doubt, I don’t mean that I doubt everything. For instance, I rarely doubt that God exists. Walking in the decay of a December wood, reading through a journal of this year’s medical discoveries, listening to a Bach aria, scrolling through Hubble updates, I can tell that God lives. The stuff of earth doesn’t provide a complete theology. In fact, it often leaves me with as many questions as answers, because the Almighty will not be pinned to a card like a giant stag beetle. However, the beauties and wonders of the universe do tend to point me toward a Creator. They whisper that He lives within and beyond the dimensions in which my brain operates. What I doubt most often is that God loves me, and usually that doubt rises from pain. It can be hard for me to understand why Someone with the power to stop hurt wouldn’t do it. When pain lasts a long time, I can begin to wonder if my suffering is a result of punishment, or if God just doesn’t like me very much after all. Cognitively, I know this sort of thinking contradicts the gospel. I could point to verses in the Bible and prove to you that this doubt is invalid. Still, there is something deep inside me that struggles here again and again. This Christmas completes a difficult year for our family. Two weeks before school began, my husband was asked to resign from a church that he planted and pastored for ten years. The town in which we live is industrial, and the leaders of our church decided that they wanted to take a more corporate approach to ministry. They explained that they wanted a CEO-type leader instead of a shepherd/teacher. We understood this decision. It is true that our vision for ministry is not business-oriented. (I’m an artist. My husband is a gentle, patient, teaching soul.) However, the request hit unexpectedly, just as I was entering the flurry of a demanding new teaching job, and just as we were learning that my father needed serious heart surgery. For several weeks, I felt like I was falling off a swing. At first I just wanted to die. I could barely even breathe. I was devastated to learn that people I loved considered our investment disposable. It took months to scroll back through a decade of memories, reexamine faces I had thought safe, and realize that things had not been what I had imagined. Then, as the days passed, my sense of rejection expanded from man to God. I thought that maybe friends and leaders weren’t the ones rejecting me, but heaven itself. Maybe God was throwing us away, too. This has been one of the hardest years of my life, but it has also provided a pain that I needed to know. God is using this particular humiliation and loneliness to show me things about his love that I couldn’t have known in safety and comfort. Furthermore, I am not the only one who has ever lived through rejection. As a writer, as a friend, as a mother, God saw fit to train my soul in how an essential sorrow works. Maybe you have lived through a rejection, too. In fact, the world is so full of hurt, it’s likely that you have known pain far more severe than mine. Maybe your spouse was unfaithful, or maybe you lost a close friend to betrayal. Perhaps years of a relationship were pushed aside, or maybe you were shunned by a group of people to whom you had given everything. It’s possible that a parent broke your heart, or that a sibling used you. It could be that a thousand tiny disappointments finally collected until you grew so bruised that you could hardly function at all. As I sit here making words for you, trying to reach my hand out to yours, I wonder if you are sitting in your chair, staring into the computer screen, knowing the full ache of being disposed. Children of this long, discarded night, will you walk a while with me? Would you tuck a weary arm through mine so that we can step in cadence and talk over the bitter questions that rise from such years as what we have had? If you are very much like me, you have already been trying to make things better for a very long time. Do I see exhaustion in your eyes? Have you used up all your strength? That is what most of us do, I think. When trouble threatens to break us, we threaten trouble by working harder. Some troubles overcome by labor, I suppose. But there are other sorts which cannot be defeated by effort, though we spend everything we have upon them. We work, and we work, until one day we wake up and realize that we are working more from habit than from hope. Perhaps your hope has even died. Mine did for a while. I lived with a fear of drowning choking in my throat. I struggled like a man treading water, tangled in ropes, fighting in a vast, roaring ocean. I fought my way through each day encumbered by the bonds of my own labor’s strain. Do you know what this is like? Then come step with me into the night. It’s freezing out here. I’m wearing my duck cloth jacket. The hood has fallen back so that the winter wind stings my ears. You are standing beside me, blowing heat from your lungs into the pink cup of your fingers. The grass below our shoes crunches. Without speaking, we turn our faces up to the expanse, blinking our burning eyes against the void, finding nothing to see at all. How empty it is. I am tempted to squint and try to find an angel in those clouds. I am tempted to do that because this is the sort of void that I don’t like to explore. I’d rather make something up. Where is God in our pain? If He loves us, why would He veil Himself behind the pitch of night? Why would He refuse to come to us in the way that we were expecting? Doesn’t He know that we are so tired it seems as if our hearts are growing back into the earth? Doesn’t He know that we are like Adams being unmade by sadness, being turned back from warm flesh into sod and into stone? We stand like forgotten towns, waiting for a Messiah. There is only quiet and cold between us for the full pulse of an hour. Then, standing beside you, I remember a song stitched from the best old stories. It was woven from the first tales we believed, tales of beauty, and battles, and the kindest of Kings. Those stories once blew against my heart like breath on a fire, like wind on the strings of an Aolean harp. I will sing as much to you as I can remember. However, this tale will require all of your thirst, all your want, all your pining, bitter grief. It will ask you to follow the thread of your pain like a dim lantern, into the trajectory of love, and watch while every honest emptiness is torn asunder by radiance. “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Those first, best stories were true, Discarded One. While we tend the flocks of our lives on this biting, barren landscape, the ancient throng divides our sorrow, in wonder it now declares: “Love is born. Love is born!” Love is born, and we are chased by it. Even now, in this night of our particular darkness and rejection, in this bleak, freezing, shared silence, grace gathers us ’round like a celestial chorus. We are seen. We are wanted. We are loved. The Holy One is come for you, and for you, and for you, and for me. Fear not. All glory be to God on High. “Come, Children of this Long, Discarded Night” https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ComeChildren.mp3

The Facebook app sneaks those other app recommendations in so smoothly. I went through the emotions of interest to intrigue to disgust in record time as I discovered, scrolling through Facebook, that someone has found a way to commercialize Advent. I figured it was in the best interest of marketing people to continue to ignore advent and start Christmas earlier and earlier each year. But under my “suggested apps,” I read this: Advent Calendar 2013 (there’s the interest and intrigue): Discover a new app every day for the 25 days before Christmas! (there’s the disgust). I had to click on it. The Advent 2013 app promises that you can get into the festive mood while waiting for Santa with daily mini games and daily gifts. I’m not writing here to rail against commercialization. There are plenty of posts for that, and quite frankly, I’m willing to put up with it. Free market, free society, etc. Not to get too political, but I’m willing to put up with the downsides of an imperfect system. Better to spend a few moments thinking about what Advent really is. And this app reminded me that it’s definitely not the “exciting run-up to Christmas!” A friend of mine who didn’t observe Advent once explained why: “I don’t like the time of year where we spend a few weeks pretending Jesus didn’t come.” It’s important to remember that Advent is not that, either. We don’t put on an act and pretend to be solemn. So what is Advent? There are lots of better answers to the question than I can provide, but I had a thought this year that is helping me better get my mind around it. Advent is like starting on page one of your favorite book. You know it’s a great story. You know how it makes you feel. You know the end  but you also know you’re going to love reading it again, probably even more this time around. I’ll just go ahead and put too fine a point on it. To be even more accurate, Advent is like re-reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2006. You know the final book is coming. You have some strong hints and theories about how it will end. That’s pretty much where we’re at in the history of the world, isn’t it? And I love returning to page one of that story every single year at this time, not least because I know it’s not just a story, it’s our story. We may only have bit parts in it, but that’s enough. And it’s a joy and a privilege given by grace alone.

Rebecca Reynolds and I wrote this Advent song during one of our Hutchmoot 2013 sessions. It is part of a larger collection of new but old-sounding hymns we’ve collaborated on with Jeff Taylor. We’re scheduled to go back into the studio in mid-December, and we will finish the record in January and February with somewhere around 15 or 16 tracks. Credits: Jeff Taylor, piano, accordion; Ron Block, guitar, lead and harmony vocal; Luke Bulla, violins. Julie Lee, harmony vocals. Available here. “Come Children of this Long Discarded Night” (Music by Ron Block, Moonlight Canyon Publishing, BMI/Words by Rebecca Reynolds, Wynken Owl, BMI) https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ComeChildren.mp3 Come, children of this long, discarded night Encumbered by the bonds of labor’s strain What burns against the pitch of heaven’s veil? To woo each mortal soul from Eden’s pain? Come, trouble of the slow, forsaken years Bent low from friendless journey o’er the earth While hearts of men have worn to sod and stone, What brightness hearkens like the fires of home? CHORUS: Oh, hear the shining thrill of grace resound! The ancient throng in wonder now declares That Love is born! That Love is born! All glory be to God on high, All peace, good will toward men in Him is found. Come, children of each dark and distant land From stories of a kind and noble king These winds that stir thy thrumming heart’s desire Proclaim the hope that this glad even’ brings. Come, impulse of thy tired, waning joy Come thirst, and want, and pining, bitter grief Lift up your eyes, behold what radiance stirs To remedy each sorrow sprung from earth. CHORUS: Oh, hear the shining thrill of grace resound! The ancient throng in wonder now declares That Love is born! That Love is born! All glory be to God on high, All peace, good will toward men in Him is found. All peace, good will toward men in Him is found.

So, I saw Ender’s Game, the movie, last night. This is not a movie review, but the movie wasn’t too bad, I guess. It’s just when you love a book, and have for 20 years, it’s hard to see it reduced so dramatically. Ditto all 18 movie parts of that massive volume, The Hobbit, ditto The Lord of the Rings, etc., etc. But that’s not what this is about. Please just allow, for the sake of argument, that it’s common for movie adaptations of beloved books to be disappointing, underwhelming affairs that leave us hungry for more. At best, they still feel so much LESS than they could be. This got me thinking about my own life, and how in many ways it’s based on a book. I don’t mean this to be corny, but my story is the story of Jesus, because I’m united to him in his death and resurrection. I’m his, part of his bride; I’m in him and my life is in him. I love him. He is my Master and my God. I get that from a book. Yes, from elsewhere as well, but the story is in the book. My life, in a way, is a book adaptation. It might be easy to go for the guilt jugular here. We all know the popular, “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to prove you guilty?” Kind of a, “What have you done for me lately?” approach. But… If you were accused of being someone desperately in need of grace, would there be enough honesty in your life to prove it? A little different, I know, but maybe worth thinking about, especially for all of us “older brother” types. I’m not an open book, because I’m afraid of what you might read in me. Hey, sometimes I’m a poor adaptation of The Story. Other times I’m a breathing testament, a witness to the holy, extraordinary reality of the coming New World. I don’t mean to shame you here, though shame is not alwayss a bad goad, I guess. But it’s kind of exciting to think about really loving a story so much that it transforms us, that we’d be positively cheerful in living it out. Not as a show, but as an outworking of a blooming reality. Usually this kind of thing isn’t done sitting down, or through abdication and passivity (temptations for me). In the best stories, in the best movies, characters we love do things. Action!

Of all the construction disciplines, plumbing is my favorite. It’s quiet—contemplative even. There aren’t so many power tools whining. There isn’t a lot of pounding or hammering. It’s not as quiet as painting, but it’s more cerebral—just the right amount of figuring and measuring without being overly technical. Plumbers spend their days dealing with issues that the rest of us don’t want to have to deal with. If you aren’t grateful for plumbers, you ought to be. I spent one summer working for a plumbing company. That summer with the plumbers yielded more anecdotes than five years here in the leafy suburbs. Some of the best anecdotes can’t even be sufficiently sanitized for use in this forum. They involve a running feud with a tribe of roofers who refused to accord plumbers the respect they deserved. I would say “use your imagination,” but your imagination is probably no match for these roofers or these plumbers. Or, I should say, your imaginative energies are differently directed than these guys’. I hope they are, anyway. There is a hierarchy among plumbers. Those who have paid their dues get to do the new construction. It’s clean work. Pleasant work. You run brand new pipe in fresh-dug trenches and into spanking new houses that smell of sawdust and sheetrock. The gleaming toilets might as well be great porcelain soup tureens. But those plumbers who are still paying their dues find themselves on the service crew. Anything can happen on the service crew. When disaster strikes and things that should have been in the sewer end up in your house, it’s the service guys who get the call. The new construction crew stay warm in their beds, dreaming the dreams of the blessed. On our service crew there was a man named Rusty. He was like a Navy Seal of plumbers. You could drop Rusty into the hottest spot imaginable, and he would do whatever it took to complete his mission. Whatever it took. As a service crew plumber, one learns to quiet the squeamishness that might keep a person from doing what has to be done. But even by those standards, Rusty was something special. I have seen Rusty lie flat in the mud beside a sewer access and thrust his whole arm–fingertip to shoulder–into the foaming, gurgling, sloshing stew. Whatever it took. I have seen the dark waters recede again thanks to Rusty’s resourcefulness and skill and iron stomach. Whatever it took. And yet when Rusty wasn’t plunging his arm into raw sewage, he was the most fastidious person I have ever known. He was forever washing his hands and fixing his hair. If he ever walked past a mirror without stopping and checking his look, I wasn’t there to see it. He kept his beard neatly trimmed, and he rolled up the short sleeves of his plumber’s shirt just so. One day Rusty found himself peering into a deep hole leading into a sewer. It was too dark down there to see what he needed to see. His flashlight was in his tool pouch, and his tool pouch was back at the truck. So he felt around in his pockets and found his lighter. If you know much about sewers, you are probably saying, “Nooooo, Rusty! Not the lighter!” But Rusty can’t hear you. He has pulled the lighter out of his pocket, and he knows as well as you do that sewers give off methane gas and that methane gas is flammable—explosive, even—but for some reason he’s not thinking, and he holds the lighter right next to his face and flicks it to life. There is a pop and a flash. Rusty staggers backwards. His hair is mostly singed off in front. His eyebrows are gone. His beard isn’t looking so hot either. Rusty took the rest of the day off to go to the hairdresser, who did wonders for him. He submitted his hairdressers’ receipt to the owner of the plumbing company, who reimbursed it as a work-related expense. “It was all in the line of duty,” the bossman said.

In the ancient world, fasting came before feasting. The great festival of God’s Incarnation, the Christ-Mass, was being celebrated in the Church by about 220 A.D. It was natural to the Early Church that a season of self-examination and repentance would lead up to this festival. By the fourth-century A.D., the four Sundays preceding Christmas were set aside to prepare for the Coming of Christ. They called this season “Coming,” Adventus in Latin, Advent. Over 1600 years later, the Church still celebrates the four weeks before Christmas as a time of special focus on the spiritual life. This year, I’m offering a devotional guide for the Advent season. Inspired by Herman Melville and Eugene Peterson, I call it The Harpooner. The Harpooner guides you through this holy season. Short Bible readings, traditional prayers, and a brief homily will help prepare you for Christ’s visitation. It’s available in ebook form as a PDF or an ePub file. It can be read on your e-reader, smartphone, computer, or tablet. The print version is available in paperback. The devotional is 25 chapters long, with an introduction, about 72 pages. You can get it here, or at Amazon.com/author/mckenzie

I was mad at God. It was the 30th of November, a date by which I’ve traditionally completed all of my Christmas shopping, planned my holiday meals, decked half the halls and basically thrown myself heart and soul into the preparations for the season I love best. It’s not that I’m so organized: it’s just that where Christmas is concerned I can scarcely contain my joy. The excitement starts percolating somewhere around about Halloween, and it’s all I can do to hold myself back until after Thanksgiving from draping tinsel over the mirrors and crowning every picture in the house with a branch of holly. I love Christmas so much that I cry when we put the tree up and I cry when we take the tree down—and that never a day before Epiphany. I get so tender over the season, in fact, that the very angle of the light on a late December afternoon is enough to bring tears to my eyes. But that year I just wasn’t up to it. I was worn out with sorrow, with protracted waiting and exhausted hopes, crushed under a disappointment that felt like a physical blow. Not exactly a recipe for a happy Christmas. And it was all God’s fault. I told Him so, standing at my window, looking out over a diamond-shot dawn that tangled itself among the velvety arms of my favorite cedar tree and suffused the rising mists with a pale golden light. Christmas, with all its gilted joys and tender associations, would only make things worse. “I can hardly bear the thought that my Christmas rose has such a thorn.” I whispered it to the windowpane, and then I immediately thought how silly that was, for the manger itself leads to the Cross and it was a crown of thorns that drew drops of blood as red as holly berries. I knew all that, had sung about it for years, had written little pieces acknowledging the sorrow brooding over that stable in Bethlehem. I had even speculated about the angels’ perspective on the matter, posing that they “may well have bent low in wonder, but could it be that their eyes were dimmed with tears?” I knew that sorrow was a part of joy, as inextricable as the Cross is from the Resurrection, and that any earthly hurt can make us keen to that loving heartbreak of God. The sorrow had just never been so tangible, so odiously unavoidable. And my thorn had such an ugly name: Barrenness. It takes a good, stout Old Testament word to express the arid disgrace of it: the Bible is painfully good at looking things in the eye and calling them what they are, and those first faithful ones certainly knew a desert when they saw one. What better depiction of the wasting dearth of disappointed hopes than a weary land hopeless for rain? For a long time I shied away from that word. I held it at arm’s length and buoyed up my spirits with a sanguine hope for “next year.” But on that late November morning, options dwindled and hopes all but extinguished, I stared into its lifeless expanse and realized with a horror that seemed to drain all the life out of me that this was the wilderness into which Jesus was asking me to follow Him. It was the last place on earth I wanted to go. I wanted the desert of waiting to give way to a desire fulfilled. I wanted Him to be glorified, yes, but I wanted Him to do it by giving me what I longed for. The fact was, He had let me down. Early in the newborn days of the previous January He had whispered a word to me, a potent assurance that seared itself on my mind in an unmistakable way. He had comforted my storm-tossed heart with a passage from Isaiah that seemed to echo down through the centuries with a shout of triumphant hope and explode right into the very midst of the quiet room in which I sat reading with burning eyes. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; ran my trusty old King James, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. The words were a cooling shower, steaming and hissing on the dry ground of my desert place of longing, and I sensed the silent movement of God’s voice like a breeze among the brittle grasses: It’s alright to be sad about that. Now—let Me make something beautiful. “Way to go, God,” I wanted to say. “You’re really going to be glorified this time.” And what better way to show Himself strong than to make possible that which had proved impossible? To utter a resounding “Yes!” where circumstances had said such an inexorable, “No.” I could hardly wait to see what He was going to do. And here I was almost a year later, disillusioned and disenchanted, in one of the darkest places I have ever known in my whole life. Nothing had changed—nothing but a heartbreaking flare of medical hope that had ended in ashes and a desire that had grown too heavy to bear. I felt bereft; bereaved and utterly forgotten, with no one to blame but the Author of the universe. But there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years when it comes to playing the blame game with God: He can take it. “Reviling is also a kind of praise,” says the poet; “pour out your grievances,” says the psalmist. I have to believe that God prefers even insolence to apathy, feigned or otherwise—or worse yet, a pious stoicism. Complaint, at least, is personal; murmuring is abstract, which is why I think God must hate it so: it destroys intimacy. Astonishingly, when I’ve been most angry and honest with Him, His benevolence ends up appearing most poignantly to me. And in the first tender days of that particular Advent season, in the gathering glory of this great Giving and Coming, a bright-winged shadow seemed to gather and fall over me and a breath of wind stirred through the barrens of my wilderness. There is beauty in this place, He began to tell me again and again, in precious and particular ways, and I clung to that word like a drowning swimmer. If there was beauty here, I had to see it, for without its promise in my life I knew I would perish inwardly, even if it took a lifetime to do it. If there was no beauty here, there was no beauty anywhere—the thought chilled me to the marrow of my soul. But God’s mercy is new every morning, and visits us in a thousand unforeseen ways. The words of a favorite carol bore fresh grace to me the first time I heard it that year: And so through every time of life, to him who acts with reason, The beauty of all things doth appear. All things! Even this wasting patch of earth? Even this bewilderment of pain and desire? Even the hard-crusted face of suffering and surrender? Yes, yes and yes! came the answer on all sides, as if the very rocks and stones of my desert cried out in praise of God’s harmony of things. Almost against my will, I went back and looked at that passage in Isaiah again—and I saw something I had never seen before. Those verses speak not of exchange, but of transformation. The desert in this case is not merely traversed for a season and then gratefully left behind—it is remade. Renamed; plowed and sown and domesticated. This from the hand of the God who “calls things that are not as though they were” and who makes new things out of nothingness. The wilderness shall blossom as the rose. “All right, Lord,” I said. “Have at it.” And He did. On the first Sunday in that December we attended the Advent Procession at the cathedral downtown. The service is an ancient one, steeped in monastic tradition, wherein the choir travels around the church, singing at all the points of the compass, symbolizing the passage from darkness into light that our Lord’s Advent fulfills. I am such a visual person that it is very meaningful to me, with all the anticipation building to the final glorious Latin hymn sung on the steps leading up to the altar. The most enlightening moment, however, was in the middle of the service, in the midst of a song I had never heard before. From the back of the cathedral came the exultant springing of music and words, buoyant as birdflight: People, look east! The time is near Of the crowning of the year. Make your house fair as you are able, Trim the hearth and set the table. People, look east and sing today: Love, the Guest, is on the way. An overwhelming longing seized me, deeper and more wordless than even my longing for a child, and I sat there in the pew with tears standing in my eyes and my heart nearly pounding out of my chest. A year ago I had imagined myself welcoming the baby we had so long prayed for by this time, but in that moment of blinding, choking joy, there in the holy hush of a cathedral with angels’ voices filling the air, the Lord sang His own longing over me: Welcome Me! Prepare for Me! Incarnate your love in practical ways—love your loved ones for My sake! Open wide your heart and your home and receive Me more joyfully than ever before! It was both a gift and a charge; a glad challenge my tired heart suddenly—miraculously—roused to meet. I felt as though strong wings were lifting me from beneath; as though a cup of joy had been held to my lips and a gentle voice commanded me to drink my fill. As though the wilderness itself was breaking into song all around me. Furrows, be glad! Though earth is bare, One more seed is planted there: Give up your strength the seed to nourish, That in course the flower may flourish. People, look east and sing today: Love, the Rose, is on the way. That moment threw a quiet mantle of wonder over the rest of the season, tingeing every act with a significance I had never known. A few days before Christmas I was up on a ladder wiring greenery onto a chandelier in anticipation of the loved ones that were soon coming, humming Lo, How a Rose under my breath (anything that had anything to do with roses seemed inherent with meaning that year), when suddenly I stepped down, clippers in hand, under the thrall of a singularly beautiful thought. I went straight to the phone, dialed the wholesale florist I use, and promptly ordered a huge box of blood red roses. When my husband came in with them later I literally danced around the table as he set the box down and lifted off the lid. They were breathtaking: an utter luxuriance of crimson and velvet, couched in a bed of tissue-soft wrappings. But ever so much more than that: they were to me both an image and an offering; an honor to the Author of this glad revel we were keeping in His name. Those roses were my personal statement of faith; my version of perfume, lavished before the coming King. I nursed them through two harrowingly warmer-than-usual nights and one downright balmy day, but at the end of it I had the joy of spreading out on the porch with my floral supplies and clipping and wiring to my heart’s delight. I made a big wreath of ivy to hang in our bedroom window and trimmed it with snowy white hypericum berries and sprigs of cedar flanking the perfect blooms. I tucked roses among the greenery over pictures and into the big arrangement of holly and pine in my grandmother’s white porcelain compote. I laid them in beds of cedar along the mantle and I worked them into the wreath on the front door. And for the dining room, I fashioned them in rings upon pedestals of oasis and set pineapples—that time-honored symbol of hospitality—down in the center. I can’t remember when I’ve had such fun decorating, or been so pleased with the results. And this in a year when I wasn’t sure I was equal to Christmas at all. On Christmas Eve our home was bursting at the seams with family and friends-like-family. After the blessing, I read the beloved old greeting penned by Fra Giovanni in 1513 which has become a standard in our home. But never had the words seemed so appropriate: There is glory and beauty in the darkness, could we but see! And to see, we have only to look. I could vouch for that a hundred times over—but as I looked around the circle of beloved faces, I knew that every single one of them could testify to it as well. These were no untouched souls—many of them so much older and wiser than me by far—but faithful men and women of God who had taken His hand and wandered through deserts of their own. And every single one of them had come up with Him rejoicing—regardless of the circumstances. They had seen a light in that dark place that the world could not offer or explain away. And they had never been the same. The rooms rang with laughter and the snapping of fires and sounds of feasting and good fellowship that day. But loveliest of all to me were the sounds of the children, running through the hall, squealing in their games in the backyard. They lined up for the old-fashioned treat of oranges with soft peppermint stick ‘straws’ (now an institution, even among the teenagers) and they pulled English crackers in the den by the tree. One three-year-old lass required my help to pull hers and toppled over backward in a cloud white batiste and astonishment when it gave way—I have to say it might just have been the most beautiful sight of the day in a day full of beauty. I will never forget that Christmas, or the fundamental shift that happened down inside of me. How it literally changed everything and how the wilderness flowered before my incredulous eyes. My desire had not abated a whit; if anything, it was heartier and haler than ever. But the wild anger had gone, and in its place there bloomed a fresh-flowered hope that all would be well: not because life is perfect or every desire has been accomplished, but because He is. Because He came among us, and He’s still here when Christmas is over. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth, and worketh righteousness: In the years since that has been the standard I have borne in all my preparations for Christmas; a torch flaming in the darkness and a voice in the wilderness. And He does meet us, in our most broken places, year after year, with the marvel of His advent. And He does work wonders—miracles of quiet righteousness—even if they are so hidden in the depths of our hearts only He can see them. But wonders, no less. Wondrous as a heart breaking with longing and joy at the same time; inexplicable as a barren place blossoming with roses. Ah—with God, nothing shall be impossible. originally published on the Art House America blog, November 2012.

[The digital audiobook of Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative is available in the Rabbit Room store. Ebook available via Amazon.] This past spring when my friend Stephen Gause (record producer, songwriter, and one of the kindest men I’ve ever known) invited me to work with him to turn Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative into an audiobook, I jumped at the offer because I wrote the book to be read aloud. Much of my own editing during the writing process came from reading what I had written aloud. If it sounded like writing, I rewrote it. I wanted this book to be something people could read to each other because beautiful are the feet and voices of those who bring good news. There’s something rich and lovely about one person telling the story of the coming of Christ to another. The story reaches so far back. Back before Father Abraham had any sons, the God of the universe made him a promise. He would be the father of a great nation, and through him all the peoples of the earth would be blessed. One night God brought him outside his tent in the desert and said, “Look toward heaven. Count the stars if you’re able. So shall your offspring be.” (Gen 15:5) I grew up hearing stories like this. But something came alive for me when one night in college I found myself in the Middle East not too far from Abraham’s desert, lying on my back, staring up at that same starry sky. In the desert, the night is a magnificent thing to behold. The Lord silenced me with his glory. I thought about this oath God made to Abraham. Here was a man who for his entire life had been unable to have children with his wife, though God’s promise to him was all about descendants. I thought about how hard this would have been to accept, how improbable was the math. And then I pictured Abraham stepping out beneath the brilliant canopy of stars flung across the heavens, and I imagined the Lord silencing his doubt with the same glory he was now using to silence me. What a mercy that must’ve been to Abraham, for God to meet him in his doubt with this display of glory. Though Abraham couldn’t begin to count the stars above, his life was in the hands of the one who made them. Every story God tells is filled with glory. Like Abraham beneath the stars, I want to see it. I want to be captured by the wonder of impossible promises coming true. I want to read the pages of Scripture with my eyes open to the beauty of mercy and grace. I want this for you as well. One of my highest hopes for this book is that it will deepen your understanding of the wonder and glory of the story of the Bible. As a pastor, biblical literacy is one of the most important goals of my work. I want people to know what the Bible says. The challenge this book presented was this: how do I tell the arc of the story of God’s redemptive purpose in sending his son in a way that’s faithful to the text of Scripture, knowing I must abridge or omit many wonderful and important moments? This puzzle took me through the process of embracing what this book is and what it is not. First, let me tell you what this book is not. It is not complete. My focus is specifically to tell the story of the need for and the coming of Christ, so I’ve left a lot of Scripture untouched. Second, this book is not a substitute for the Bible itself. In Deuteronomy, the Lord instructs his people to tell their children about him continually—when they’re tucking them in at night, when they’re walking down the road, when they’re sitting down to eat. (Deut 6:4-9) They were to have the stories of Scripture posted everywhere—on their doorposts, wrapped around their arms, emblazoned on their foreheads. There was the text of Scripture—the Law of Moses—and then there were the stories people told about it, those “did you hear the one about” moments. This book is a collection of those moments. Last, this book is not exclusively a Christmas book. We haven’t told the Christmas story well if we’ve limited its relevance to one month of the year or its scope to a few chapters from the Gospels. This book is designed to guide readers through a contemplative season of Advent—twenty-five chapters, one for each day of December—taking the reader or listener from Eden to the manger outside Bethlehem. I hope that taking twenty-five days in June or a weekend in October to read it would prove just as meaningful. Now I want to tell you what this book is. First, it is meant to be a servant of the Bible. I’ve packed the print version of the book with hundreds of scripture references. Since I paraphrase pretty freely throughout in order to maintain a unified voice, those references are there to lead readers to the truer, taller tale Scripture unfolds with perfect sufficiency. As much as I was able, I infused my prose with allusions to the phrases and imagery of the Biblical text. Second, this book is my story. Every measure of brokenness reflected in these pages is in some measure the story of my brokenness. Every need that rises to the surface is in some way a need of mine. Every tendency toward rebellion, every cry of desperation, every prayer for forgiveness and every hope of redemption rings true in me. In Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative, I’m telling the story of how God loved and rescued me. I believe Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away my sin, and for that I am eternally grateful. [Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative is available in the Rabbit Room store, both in hardcover, and now in digital audiobook format.] Here’s a sample from Chapter 1.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Ch1.mp3 __________ https://twitter.com/russramsey http://www.facebook.com/russ.ramsey

“There is but one sin,” wrote G.K. Chesterton: “to call a green leaf grey.” Which is to say, every kind of sin derives from a willful refusal to see and enjoy the beauty, the glimmers of transcendence that surround us. The serpent, remember, stood with Eve in the beauty and abundance of Eden and said, in effect, “Can’t you see that God is holding out on you?” To refuse to see beauty—to call a green leaf grey—is to say that God is not good. Beauty is a kind of grace. It comes from outside and changes something on the inside, and it usually comes as a surprise when it does. When I experience beauty I am very aware that something is happening that I could have never ginned up within myself. I feel gratitude. I feel longing. I feel that there is more going on than I can account for. But I can’t feel pride as a result of experiencing beauty. Consider by contrast other aspects of religious experience—truth, say, or morality. When I understand truth (or think I do), I am in constant danger of considering myself better than those who don’t understand that truth. When I practice morality, I am in similar peril. I don’t wish to belittle either truth or morality; beauty wouldn’t be much good without them. I mean only to suggest that when it comes to understanding what grace is and how it works, beauty is a pretty good guide. Beauty is sneaky like grace, fulfilling desires and healing hurts we didn’t even know we had. It slips past our defenses. Beauty isn’t quite irresistible (we all make ourselves blind to beauty from time to time), but even the hardest heart would have to be vigilant indeed never to be affected by a wide sky or a bright eye or a well-turned poem. In the end, however, the real work of earthly beauty isn’t to fulfill our longings but to stir up longings it could never fulfill. Beauty sidles up and whispers, “What do I remind you of?” Then it slips away and leaves us wanting more.

Okay, I know, I know, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet—but I’m going to talk about Christmas music anyway. Buddy Greene is one of the nicest and most likable guys in Nashville. Every time he drops by the RR office, whether it’s to buy a book, play a harmonica, or just say hello, he’s all smiles and laughter from the moment he walks in until the moment he walks out. And he leaves smiles and laughter behind when he’s gone. One day last month I got a humble email from Buddy telling me that he had just finished recording a little Christmas album and he wondered if I’d give it a listen. Now let me be honest. My fear was that I was in for an hour of weary Christmas classics and carols adapted for the harmonica—and I wasn’t sure how much harmonicated “Jingle Bell Rock” I could handle. I should go ahead and admit that I don’t really like Christmas music in general. There are a few exceptions, of course. I love Harry Connick. I love Jill and Andy Gullahorn’s Christmas CD. I loved last year’s Over the Rhine Christmas record. And I love . . . well . . . I suppose that’s about it (I’m not including Behold the Lamb of God here because I think that’s something more than Christmas music, if you know what I mean). So it’s with great surprise that I’ve found Buddy Greene’s December’s Song added to that small rotation of favorites. Somehow, it’s a nice fit beside those other Christmas records. It seems right at home there. It’s a little bit folk, a little bit bluegrass, a little bit hymnal, a little bit jazz, even a little bit crooning Bing Crosby. I love it. So I’m going to shut up and let you hear some of it. Check out the song below. “Canticle of the Turning” by Buddy Greenehttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Canticle.mp3 Buddy just released the record to the public last week. You should check it out. Here’s the link.

“Come, let us worship God, wonderful in his saints!” So ended Michael Ward’s introduction in our program today for the C.S. Lewis memorial service. And that is exactly what we did. I read those words as I sat in my straight wooden chair beneath the rainbow filtered light of the soaring stained glass windows in Westminster Abbey. The organ hummed the opening music amidst the swish and whisper of the gathering congregation. I watched almost a thousand people filter in to celebrate the life of C.S. Lewis. Wielder of words, weaver of stories, and humble-hearted friend, Lewis wrote and spoke from the Love that was the light by which he saw the world. In honoring his life today, we blessed the beautiful God who was the heart and Joy of it all. Come, Holy Spirit, and send the heavenly radiance of your light. Come, Father of the poor; come giver of gifts; come, light of all hearts. Amen. This was the opening prayer. I have a thousand things I want to write later on. I thought hard about reason and imagination once more as I listened to Alistair McGrath and Malcolm Guite speak on Lewis’ ideas on those topics yesterday. But tonight, as I write this short post, I’m basking in the way that the life of Lewis, an author I love, one of the first people I hope to meet in heaven, showed us the life of God. There was such joy in the air today, such a taste of the life that will someday come. The Dean’s prayer: Almighty God, Father of lights and author of all goodness: we give thee humble praise for the life and work of thy servant C.S. Lewis, and beseech thee that, as he has helped us to look to a world beyond this world and to hopes better than our own, we may come with him to the fulness of everlasting joy which thou has prepared for them that truly love thee, in the heavenly courts of they Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. “Further up and further in!” roared the Unicorn, and no one held back… And soon they found themselves all walking together – and a great, bright procession it was – up towards the mountains higher than you could see in this world even if they were there to be seen. But there was no snow on those mountains: there were forests and green slopes and sweet orchards and flashing waterfalls, one above the other, going up for ever… The light ahead was growing stronger. Lucy saw that a great series of many-coloured cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty…” —part of the excerpt from The Last Battle, read aloud by Douglas Gresham. I felt I got a little “further up and further in” today. Lewis is the one who calls us that way, and I think “roar” would be a good way to describe it, as he does the voice of the unicorn, Jewel. Every aspect of his life was a shout and a song calling us further into the great Reality he apprehended in imagination and described with his powerful reason. God bless C.S. Lewis. I remember him with thanks today. And I’m ready to follow him deep into the mountains and life of God.