dual personalities

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through our neighborhood…city workmen are starting a new street project which involves numerous large earth-moving vehicles and trucks moving earth in our own side yard.

Last week a row of mature trees was removed. Also very noisy and disruptive. We knew this project was coming, but, you have to admit, the timing is really special. C’est la vie.

I am not going to let this disrupt my happy Christmas mood and you shouldn’t either. Don’t let whatever is going on in your life that is annoying and causing you to sleep badly take your focus from what it is we are celebrating–the incarnation of our Lord and Savior!

Here’s an old reminder from Frederick Buechner to hang in there and trust God:

I REMEMBER SITTING parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.   

–originally published in Telling Secrets

And this made me laugh. Now I want to go see Santa at the Bass Pro Shop. (Who knew that was a thing?)

*Charles Wesley