Christmas is God deciding to find people who didn’t want to be found but could not afford not to be found.

Stand up and be the light that God created you to be. Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.

It is when I finally come to realize that the sum total of ‘who I am’ is less than what I need to save ‘who I am’ that I have then created space for God to be the great “I AM WHO I AM.

I have found that unless I surrender every part of my life to God every part of my day, I will end up missing most every part of my life every day of my life.

As a kid we would step out on those thick summer nights and collect lightening bugs. And with a mason jar chock full of them, their combined brilliance would light up my hands as I held them. But, if I released them from the jar, their brilliance would light up the world, which now included the hands of everyone around me. And as I think about the light of the Gospel and the utter brilliance of its message, as Christians maybe we should get rid of our jars.

It’s not ‘time’ for God, for there was never a time that was not a time for Him. What it’s ‘time’ for is our realization that we’ve needed Him all the time and we just never took the time to realize that.

Without God, I am living in an endless desert forever wondering and never figuring out why it’s so hot, and why there’s no water, and why I’m dying. And although the desert seems to stretch to endless horizons in every direction, God’s coolness and water and life is but a single step right in front of me.  And if I'd just take a step, the 'wondering' and 'figuring out' would be all but figured out.

Of all the things that God could have done, I have yet to get over the fact that He chose us to fix the world that we screwed up. And in terms of second-chances, this is one of the biggest ones we’ll ever get.

If we’ve kept God far from us, we might ask how far we are from just about everything else.