All things considered, 2008 was a very hard year for an awful lot of people. Finances dried up. Marriages dissolved. Loved ones died. I know folks who struggled with addiction and physical illness. I know folks who watched helplessly as others made disastrous choices. Pain. Loss. Betrayal.

A friend sent me a text message Christmas night saying simply, “This is the worst Christmas ever.”

He very well may have been right. He lost his mother just a few months ago. His brother is in rehab, and he’s had to foot the bill. His best friend moved across the country. His biggest distraction/hobby just disappeared. He’s had a hard year.

And yet….

Plenty of good things happened this year, too. People fell in love. Babies were born. Friendships emerged. There was beautiful art seen and beautiful music heard. I know people who came out of hiding this year. I know folks who made brave and healthy choices. Yes, there may have been pain, loss and betrayal. But there was also pleasure, gain and loyalty.

That’s how it is every year. Sure, there is disappointment. But there is also hope, anticipation and — every once in a while — the bliss of having your wildest expectations met or even exceeded.

So, my challenge to you on the last day of the year is the same as my challenge to my texting friend:

Take some time to create a list of the highlights of 2008 — the good times. It doesn’t have to be a big list, but try not to just rattle it off the top of your head. Look through your calendar if you have to, but think about the best moments of 2008. I bet there were more than you remember.

This is how we learn gratitude — by choosing to remember more than the bad parts, by intentionally remembering the good and giving thanks for those times when the good outshines the bad.

“Christmas Bells”
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

When we talk about the birth of Jesus, we always turn to Luke’s or Matthew’s Gospels. That’s where we read about angels and shepherds, a star and a stable, wise men and visitations. That’s where all the familiar images of Christmas have their origin.

Mark’s Gospel skips the beginning and starts in the middle of the story. John’s Gospel goes too far back, to before the beginning of anything, and is hard to read and understand. So, John and Mark don’t get much play during December. They don’t smell enough like a stable.

But by the time he wrote his Gospel, the apostle John had had a lifetime to reflect on the events surrounding the life of Jesus. He had been the one asked to look after Mary, Jesus’ mother, so (assuming she had become part of his family) they must have spent time talking about Jesus’ birth and all the craziness surrounding it. Her face, her laugh, the way she turned phrases — these things may have been reminders to John of what Jesus was like.

When John family sat down to write his version of the story, he must have thought about where to begin. His mind must have played and replayed the details of that night in Bethlehem. Instead of starting there, though, he went beyond it and beneath it. His version begins by telling us about the One called the Word and how this Word came into a dark and dying world. In fact, as we read through the prologue to John’s Gospel (1:1-14), two words surface more than any others: Light and Life.

Jesus is many things to many people, but to John he was Light and Life. The apostle must have remembered where Jesus was standing and what he sounded like when he referred to himself by those words.

“In him was life,” John wrote (v. 4). Jesus wasn’t just alive; he was Life. Life was in him. More than just a being with a beating heard and contracting lungs, Jesus produced beating hearts and contracting lungs. He was Life, so Life was his to give. John’s Gospel reminds us that giving life was what Jesus had come to do. Jesus was the bringer of life.

“That life was the light of men,” John continued. What was going through John’s mind as he read back over his own words? He could recall watching men and women who were dark and full of death coming to Jesus, and then seeing how one touch, one word from him sent them away forever changed — forever filled with the Light and Life of the One who came to conquer our fear of death and beat back the darkness. He could remember how that Light broke into his own darkness with a simple question: “What do you want?” Jesus had asked (see John 1:38).

Life and Light…that was Jesus.

There is a little inkling of the birth to be found in John’s Gospel after all. It is one short sentence, but it says as much as Matthew or Luke do (without the gory details): “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (v. 5).

This verse should be read before Matthew and Luke. It prepares us to receive the full version of the story. The Light that is Jesus shines in, around, through, behind, beneath, beyond the darkness of the manger, the darkness of the stable, the darkness of the world, the darkness of our own hearts.

And yet we still do not understand it any more than the shepherds or the wise men did. Who can grasp the idea of Light and Life being contained in a body?

Like those first witnesses to the Christ-child, we are left to worship, adore and ponder the mystery. We pray for his Life to come to life in us. And we ask for his Light to shine forth from our hearts forever.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

Question: If you were a shepherd 2,000 years ago and were outside watching the sheep one night when an angel showed up with a message from God, well…what would you do?

Answer: Panic!

Shepherds were not highly regarded in those times. It wasn’t considered a very noble profession. You practically lived outside with animals (stupid animals, at that). You were constantly coming into contact with…animal stuff.

“Unclean” was not merely a description — it was a condition. Shepherds were unclean hygienically and ceremonially. They weren’t allowed to testify in court. They weren’t allowed in the synagogues or the Temple. Ironically, the lambs they helped come into the world — the very animals that would be sacrificed for Passover — rendered them unfit to make sacrifices in the Temple.

So what must they have thought when they saw the angel? They probably thought, Oh, no! What did we do now?

They had been told that God didn’t like unclean people, so they might have assumed the angel was there to tell them God was mad at them — or worse. Maybe God had finally reached his limit with all the uncleanness in the world and was ready to do something about it — starting with them!

But instead the angel began with these words: “Fear not.” It’s a familiar refrain if you’ve read much about angels, who were always having to preface their conversations with people this way.

“God’s not angry,” the angel continued. “In fact, I’ve got Good News for everybody — even dirty shepherds like you. You know all the stuff that’s wrong with the world, all that stuff you wish could get fixed but looks hopeless? Well, God’s going to do something about it. He’s sending Someone to save the day. This Savior is also going to be the King. You can go see him now if you want. Here’s how you’ll know him when you see him….”

Okay, wait. Don’t hurry on here.

If you’re that shepherd, how do you think that sentence should end? Think about it: This is the one sent from Almighty God to turn everything that is upside-down right-side-up. This guy is supposed to deliver. He’s going to be the greatest King you’ve ever seen. How will you know him when you find him?

“He’ll be wrapped in satin and lying in a hand-carved ivory creche. In his hand will be a golden rattle, and in his mouth will be a silver spoon.” Right?

Wrong!

“He’ll be wrapped in rags, lying in a feed trough, surrounded by stinky animals — kind of like one of your shepherd kids would be.” In other words, here’s how you’ll know the Messiah when you see him: You’ll find him in the middle of a big mess.

The whole reason this is Good News — to the shepherds that night and to us right now — is that we’re all messy people. Every night, people appear on television (under the label “News”) and tell us how the world got a little messier today. We manage to mess up every single area of life: relationships, finances, work, family, the environment, the Church (especially there), our conscience, our habits. There’s not a single place we haven’t managed to mess up. And we can’t seem to fix any of it. Try as we may, we cannot put Humpty together again.

So the angel says, “Here’s the Good News: God is not afraid of your mess.”

Our God doesn’t care how messy your life is. It couldn’t be any messier than his was. He was born in a mess — wrapped in rags, laid in a manger — and he died in a mess — stripped of his rags, hung on a cross.

And in between his first day and his last day, he mostly hung out with messy people.

We make Christmas really pretty, with red velvet bows and evergreen branches and all that. But the real story of Christmas proves that you don’t have to clean up for him. Cleanliness, it turns out, is far from godliness. If anything, it’s in the middle of our messiness that he shows up.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

God does a lot of things — many of them seem strange to our admittedly limited perspective. Without a doubt, the single most unsettling, irrational, illogical thing he has ever done is come to Earth as a baby!

If God came to Earth as a fully-grown man, we might understand that a little better. If he came to Earth as an angel, a ghost, an apparition or a disembodied voice, it might make more sense or fit our expectations a little better.

But a baby?

He was totally helpless! He couldn’t feed himself or talk or walk or control his own bladder. And have you ever been to a birth? There’s blood and sweat screaming and mucous flying everywhere…and that’s just the dads!

The whole process is uncomfortable, to say the least. It’s unseemly. It’s unsanitary. As much as we may not want to admit it, birth — for all of its wonder and amazement — is a yucky process.

And this is how God chose to enter the world.

He could have chosen any way he wanted — something miraculous and exceptional, regal and majestic. But he chose the ordinary way.

Worse than that, he chose the peasant’s way. He could have chosen a major city with doctors, nurses or midwives and their sterilized equipment. Instead, he chose a barn in a backwater town with nothing but a carpenter’s rough and calloused hands to usher him into the world. There were more animals than people looking on.

We would understand if royal officials were there eagerly awaiting his arrival. But no one important showed up save a few dirty sherpherds — oh, and some strange men from the East several months later.

It doesn’t make much sense to many people — the God of the universe humbling himself in such a way, emptying himself of so much for so little in return. But the Bible leads us to believe that this is exactly the way God wanted it.

A young couple, miles from home, are unable to find a decent place to sleep. They are forced to spend the night in a stable when she goes into labor, where she delivers a baby that has already caused so much pain and will cause even more in his attempt to bring true peace, true healing, true joy. She wraps him in strips of cloth to keep him warm as her husband makes room in the feed trough. They are both unaware that, even now, magi are headed their way from afar and shepherds are receiving the shock of their lives in the form of a heavenly chorus.

This is our God, this tiny baby with fists for hands and squinting eyes, depending on and trusting in two scared newlyweds for his survival. He risks everything in order to rescue the people who have never been able to keep their promises to him.

The storyline doesn’t make much sense to us because it is we who are so out of synch with the way things ought to be.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

This will be a long-ish story. And — I’ll just go ahead and warn you — I got a little “link happy” in this one.

So…LV Hanson works for Catalyst — as in the Catalyst Conference. I’ve asked him several times what LV stands for. He told me — I’m not making this up — that it stands for Luscious Vernon. When I started calling him that, though, he told me it didn’t really stand for anything — that it’s L(only) V(only).

Now I’ll call him Lonely Vonely Hanson. But I’ve digressed already, haven’t I?

Catalyst has decided to do some regional conferences in 2009 and will be doing one out here in California in April. Luscious Vernon is the guy Catalyst sent out here as some sort of advance scout. At least that’s the best I can figure.

And some folks in Atlanta suggested to him that when he got out here he should contact me — that somehow I’d manage to connect him with people.

Well, Lonely Vonely called me a couple of weeks ago and said he wanted to meet some influential church leaders and some people who have fascinating stories about what God is doing in their lives. Now, I’ve lived out here all of three months now. I don’t know anybody. I’m an introvert for crying out loud. But as we talked, I thought about my friend Andy Vomsteeg up in Sonoma County — who may be the boldest leader I’ve ever met. Then I thought about my friend Jay Loecken — who sold his house in Atlanta to buy an RV. He travels the country with his family just looking for people to help.

Oddly enough, when I told Luscious Vonely about Jay, he said, “You mean Chad, right? The guy from Idaho?”

I said, “There aren’t two of these guys doing the same crazy thing, are there?”

Turns out…yes.

So, yesterday afternoon, I had Lonely Vernon and his Volkswagen Vanagon, Jay and his family and their gigantic office-building on wheels, Chad and his family and their slightly less unwieldy RV, Andy Vomsteeg and the staff from River Park Community Church…all sitting in my living room talking about what God is doing out here on the west coast.

The afternoon started to get away from us, so I said, “Why don’t you all stay for dinner?”

Andy had to catch a plane home, and the River Park people said they should get back to their families. But everyone else said, “Are you sure?” And we made dinner for all these crazy vagabonds parked in my driveway.

When dinner was done, dishes were washed, the evening wore on, and I said, “Why don’t you guys just stay the night?”

Everyone said, “Are you sure?” And suddenly there was our family of five, Chad & Amy Houck with their two kids, Jay & Beth Loecken with their four kids and Luscious Lonely Vernon Vonely — 16 people total! — hanging out, talking, laughing, sharing, eating, drinking. It was like something from…I don’t know…the Bible…from the Book of Acts or something.

I was telling this story with my friend Andy Sikora earlier today, and he made a great observation. He said, “I need to hear stories like this too because I can get pretty rigid in my schedule and miss opportunities for sweet community and the encouragement that comes from being in the middle of these kinds of things.”

My life is crazy and unpredictable. Things sometimes blindside me. But it’s the things that blindside me that leave a lasting mark and change my perspective the most. It’s the crazy and the unpredictable that lead me to the place I want to be. And it all forces me to walk by faith and not by sight, to listen and follow the guidance of the Spirit, to be open for whatever God has in store for me today.

Hey, when’s the last time God totally interrupted your routine to do something cool?

The New Testament opens by re-emphasizing a theme that runs through the Old Testament: This is God’s Story. He’s been writing it since before the beginning. He accomplishes it through bizarre events, miraculous activity and unlikely people. It always exceeds our wildest expectations and stretches the limits of believability.

Mary and Joseph had dreams of their own — dreams they’d been dreaming since before God started meddling in their business. They were modest dreams, to be sure, of raising nice kids and having a nice home.

But then God showed up and invited them into a a larger Story, a dangerous story that would demand more of their time and energy than they could have ever imagined. Signing on to play their roles in this Story would be compelling, but it would also be costly. It promised a greater adventure than they could have found anywhere else — the kind worth living and dying for — but they would have to become supporting characters, rather than stars.

Life is not all about you. Obviously, you’re in there. You’re significant. Your life has meaning and purpose and all that. But let’s be honest about this: There’s a much bigger Story playing out around you. You have a couple of options. You can choose to be the star of your own story. It’s a relatively small story with a minuscule budget, and you have to write, direct, produce, act and do your own hair and wardrobe.

It’s exhausting just thinking about all that.

Or you can choose to play a supporting role in Someone Else’s masterpiece; to be precise: God’s Story. His story has no beginning and no end; it has an unlimited budget, and the wrap party promises to be something we can’t even begin to imagine.

The only problem is that you don’t get to be the star.

Of course, it’s a much better movie, and — because there’s Someone Else writing, producing and directing this thing — you don’t end up running yourself ragged and driving everyone around you insane.

The greater the story, the larger the narrative, the more able it is to withstand hardships and the more likely it is to answer the foundational questions that keep us up at night. Where did we come from? Where are we going? How are we to live in the meantime?

As it turns out, nothing less than this Big Story will really satisfy our deepest longings. What we find when we allow our stories to be absorbed into God’s larger Narrative is that we can actually embed our time into eternity.

The choice is yours. Do you want to star in your own little show? Or do you want to play a supporting role in the greatest Story ever told?

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

He probably didn’t have wings and a halo. But there was something about him — Mary knew he was an angel.

Mary was young and idealistic. Joseph was a good guy, the kind of man any father would be glad to welcome as a son-in-law. They had their whole lives ahead of them. They would get married, settle down and start having children — in that order.

Or so they thought.

But then came the strange visit from the strange visitor who announced such troubling things. He knew her name, and he said she was going to have a baby…but that couldn’t be true! She and Joseph were going to wait until after they were married before they…you know…did the thing that leads to having babies.

Still, this odd person — this angel — said she would have a child, even though she was a virgin. The baby was going to be God’s Son, and his conception would have nothing to do with the normal processes.

How in the world was she going to explain this to Joseph?

Joseph — the man with the upstanding reputation — did not take the news well. He didn’t get angry and yell at her; he was too much of a good guy for that. But he certainly wasn’t going to marry her now. She was damaged goods. Once people found out (and Nazareth was too small a place for them not to find out), it would cost him that upstanding reputation.

If he wanted to maintain his status, he would have to terminate their relationship. There was no need to make a big fuss over it. He could handle this quietly. He didn’t want to embarrass her.

But, he may have wondered, what if she is telling the truth? No, that’s crazy! There’s no way an angel showed up to a teenage girl in the middle of nowhere to tell her that she’s carrying a miracle baby. In Jerusalem? Maybe. In Nazareth? Never.

Joseph decided to sleep on it.

Little did he know that YHWH would invade his dreams, sending a messenger to let him know that Mary was telling the truth. Joseph need not be afraid to marry her, the angel said. He didn’t need to worry that Mary had been unfaithful.

And so Joseph and Mary, neither of them knowing how it would all work out, embarked on their journey together.

And you thought your engagement and wedding were stressful!

Together, they would endure the onslaught of insult and ridicule. They would hear the whispers and see the smirks. They would answer the questions they could and ignore the rest. Sometimes they doubted themselves and wondered if they had imagined the whole thing.

But then there was this baby, who became a boy, who became a man who was really a Person who had always existed. And it was all so strange and new and unheard of that it just had to be true.

And it was.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

By the time you reach the end of the Old Testament, God’s list of promises is pretty long — so long, in fact, that it’s understandable that people might get a little antsy, wondering when or if he’s ever going to get around to checking things off the list.

It had, after all, been nearly 2,000 years since God told Abraham, “I will bless you…and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3). Abraham had been confused about how this would happen because he had no children, but God miraculously intervened and caused Abraham and Sarah to have a baby boy named Isaac. But God’s blessing didn’t come to the world through him, so that promise was still unfulfilled. It hadn’t been broken, but it hadn’t been kept yet either.

It had been nearly 1,000 years since God promised King David that one of his descendants would build a house for God and reign forever. David’s son Solomon built a spectacular Temple, but that wasn’t what God was talking about. That Temple had been destroyed, and the Nation of Israel had been split in two after Solomon’s death. Another promise unfulfilled — not broken necessarily, but not kept either.

It had been nearly 600 years since God had told Jeremiah and Ezekiel that he would create a community of people who wouldn’t live God’s Law out of a sense of obligation but because of an internal desire. Again, this promise was so far from reality that people began to wonder if God would ever make good on his word.

Perhaps you wonder about things like this. Jesus promised to return and set everything right once and for all. But one look at CNN provides enough evidence to know that there’s another promise that’s been left unfulfilled.

Beyond that, God has promised rest and joy and security to his people. And many of us know what it’s like to ache for those promises to be fulfilled in our personal lives. We live with stress and anxiety. Our relationships are fractured. Our health is failing.

We may join others in wondering when or if God will ever see fit to keep his promises.

But here’s something to keep in mind: Your circumstances do not reveal God’s character. In fact, the challenge of living Christianly in our world is to view our circumstances in light of God’s unchanging character.

You see, God is patient (and that’s a good thing); he does things in his own sweet time. He makes promises, and he keeps them. But he doesn’t always keep them when or how we want him to. If you think about it for more than a moment, he’s got a pretty good track record. He has never broken one of his promises. And the promises he has fulfilled have always exceeded the expectations of people.

Most of the people who have ever lived on this earth have lived during one of the periods of silence or hidden activity. They’ve lived during the 400 years of Egyptian captivity or during the 70 years of exile or during the 400 years of inter-testamental silence or, like us, between the advents of Christ.

Knowing that we might struggle with his timing, God calls us to live with hope and trust in that which he has promised — in spite of the fact that we don’t see it yet. He calls us to look back at his track record. He calls us to look forward to the coming fulfillment of his promises.

God has, in fact, decisively acted in our past. He has made startling promises regarding our future. Only by combining the backward glance with the forward gaze do we have sufficient perspective to live in the now.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible.

Imagine what it would have been like to be born a Hebrew slave in Egypt. For more than 400 years, your people were held captive, forced to follow someone else’s orders. You might go home, weary from a long day’s work, and hear some old fool telling stories around a campfire about a God who made outlandish promises to your forefather Abraham.

He had promised to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation with a land of their own. He had promised that through Abraham’s descendants all nations on Earth would be blessed.

But you’re one of those descendants, and you’re a slave in Egypt. You don’t feel blessed.

It might have been difficult to believe the promises of this God who seemed so far away. This YHWH didn’t seem to mind your pain, your heartache. His promises might have sounded to you like some sort of fairytale, the kind of story you tell your children at night before bed.

But you would have been wrong.

Now imagine what it would have been like to be born a Hebrew slave in Persia. For more than 70 years, your people were held captive and forced to follow someone else’s orders. Again, you might head home, worn out from the kind of backbreaking labor only slaves have to do, and hear some old woman recounting (again) the stories of Israel’s God and the promises he had made to King David.

He had promised that there would always be someone from David’s lineage to sit on the throne. He had promised that someone from that lineage would eventually fulfill all the promises he had made to Abraham.

It might have been difficult to trust that God keeps his word, even though you had almost the entire Old Testament story to reflect on. It seemed as if YHWH had turned a deaf ear to the cries of this people. His promises might have sounded like old wives’ tales, the kinds of things you teach children in school to remind them to be obedient.

Again you would have been wrong.

Now imagine what it would have been like to be born in between the two testaments of the Christian Bible, in the period often referred to as “the 400 years of silence.” You may have lived in Jerusalem, but you were hardly a great nation. You were passed around like a hot potato from one superpower to the next, from Persia to Greece to Rome, with little or no say about your own laws, no foreign policy of your own, forced to pay taxes to a government that practiced the most abominable things imaginable.

The last thing you’d heard from YHWH was some cryptic message about sending the prophet Elijah back to Earth and how he would turn the hearts of fathers back to their children and vice versa, or else God himself would strike the land with a curse.

That was it. After that, nothing but a long, deafening silence for 400 more years. Clearly God was angry, but had he finally had enough? Was this the curse?

It must have been difficult for people to hold on to any kind of belief that God had anything good in store for the children of Abraham. It would have been easy to think that YHWH had given up on them and on his promises.

But once more, you would have been wrong.

———-

This is an excerpt from my latest book, The 52 Greatest Stories of the Bible