Maybe

I've sat down the write something a couple of times in the past day or so. Each time, I never have the words to say, but one keeps coming back to me: intersection.

I don't mean a traffic intersection, but the intersecting of two things, two things of importance. The image I get is sort of an eclipse...where the moon intersects the sun's light (or whatever it is that happens during an eclipse....).

Maybe it's just a good word for Christmas.

It was, after all, the time when all of history intersected with all of the future. It was when God decided to intersect with the human story. It was when the Kingdom of God started coming...it was when the now and the not yet started...where the future perfection met and continues to meet our brokenness. These intersections, however, are not too similar to the eclipse I see in my mind. Because in these intersections, it was more like a merging. The Kingdom of God didn't come and leave; it came and continues in the same direction. Everything changed at Christmas.

And everything continues to change at Christmas. We all know it's not when Christ was born, but as far as I can tell, it's good that Christmas comes at the end of the year.

I'm much more obsessed with calendar years than most people and probably more than I ought to be, but the new hope that is Christmas is necessarily concurrent in the spiritual sense with the actual changing of the calendar year and therefore, the new hope that I at least feel from that.

All of that aside, I think I'll always remember this Christmas season because of all the intersections that have happened in my life. And just as the year ends and a new one begins, like the moon eventually passing beyond the sun's rays, things will change in my life and the intersections will become a part of my past.

But maybe that won't be totally true.

I know it could never be perfectly true. Lives don't intersect to any degree of meaning and come out as they were at the beginning....I said I'll always remember this Christmas season, and I will take that one step further and say that I will always fondly remember this Christmas season, because of the intersections and because of the better person I am thanks to them.

-Zack

"The only way to really know is to really let it go"
-Ingrid Michaelson