I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.

Fear is often bred of an imagination that couldn’t let something be what it actually was.

Given the lethal enormity of sin and the inestimable value of a single soul, a baby in a manger and a man on a cross makes more sense that anything else I will ever be able to possibly imagine.

The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire.

At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?

An idea without sacrifice, regardless of grand it might be, will never be anything more than an idea.