We were not made in God's image for nothing. The child's preference for sweets over spinach, mankind's universal love for the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does--for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God's design, our lawful love.
Another toast then.

-Robert Capon

Fall was a difficult season for me. I was living too much in that season. The slow decay, the slipping away of life-as-we-know-it, the groggy-eyed sun's slow crawl over the earth--I took all of this far too much to heart. I took it far too personally. It felt like the world had turned into a sephia film in slow-motion.

Then Winter came, and C.S. Lewis's words were like a refrain in my heart: "It's always Winter, but never Christmas." Somehow, with the nights infringing on the waking hours, and the air commanding my body to be still, I felt the significance of Christmas in the heart of Winter. It is not until we've sunk to the bottom, our lungs emptied of air and our eyes of light, that we find deliverance.

Now I stand on the cusp of the New Year. I've never liked New Years. I've been quick to reduce it to short-lived resolutions and tasteless diet foods. But after a year with an extended autumn, after a year of limbo and a blurring of my vision, I am ready for a new context.

The rhythms and repetitions of life can be a comfort at times, the propelling tracks that help you move in one direction. But when you stare at the lines on the road, you can become a little dazed, forgetting you're heading Home. Without a destination, we might have some fun, but we are just entertaining ourselves to death. We are just parading to our grave.

But with the turning of the calendar page, with that new shiny 5 pinned onto the end, I am reminded that time moves in a horizontal line. The earth may be pacing in circles, but its orbits are numbered. They say that history repeats itself, that there is nothing new under the sun, but with the deliverance born in our winter, a narrative was fleshed out that would change our past, present, and future. The bad news is the old news we've lived inside. But the New has broken into the Old, and we have been given some very Good News. There is a Resolution to come by the One who will make all things New.