christmas

christmas in china. a rich time with old friends. a chance to play with their kids, get to know their personalities. view one of china's megacities from their rooftop. feast on incredible food. time to sit, and hear their stories, listen to their struggles, share some of my own, and get a deeper vision for what it looks like to live in and love a country not your own. they are poured out people, with lives marked by a desperation for what is real beyond almost anything i've ever seen. i came away hungry for more of what they have. 


i did much reflecting and reading in those ten days. thinking about the visions i have had, lost and are now being resurrected. about how unfit i am for this journey. about how self-centered i have become. and how much i pursue the things that won't last: the affection of others, knowledge, possessions, beauty, recognition... how i really have it upside-down and backwards. amidst this, Frederick Buechner's words stood out to me:


By faith we understand, if we are to understand at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to last. By faith we struggle against all  odds to be able to see...that the world is God's creation even so. It is He who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of His peace, to live in peace, out of his light to dwell in light, out of his love to be, above all things, loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world. 


and so I celebrate this christmas and wrap up the year with a prayer, for love to penetrate my heart and flay me wide open, for eyes to see God more and more in all things, and a deeper hunger for only that which is real and an utter disregard for that which is not.