A Blessed and Merry Christmas from Stormhorn

In a world that has become bewilderingly complex, may the simplicity of faith in the person of Jesus be yours today and every day. I don’t think it’s any secret that Christmas is almost certainly not the actual calendar date of Jesus’s birth. What’s important about Christmas is, it reminds us that Jesus indeed was born at a specific point in time, at a certain hour on a certain day, really and truly. If eternal life were just a matter of sound moral teachings, he need not have bothered. But he came to provide something far more than one more model in the display case of spiritual teachers; he came to offer us himself as the object of our trust in matters far too vast for us to comprehend.

Look around you. Look inside you. Is it really so hard so hard to believe that what we need is not merely answers, but a Savior?

“For God loved the world with such unfathomable depth and passion that he gave the Son whom he himself sired–God, reproducing his very heart and character uniquely in human form, clothed with flesh, emotions, personality, a voice, appetites, and a name–so that whoever puts his or her trust in the Son may possess an entirely different quality of life: eternal life, today and forever.”–John 3:16, my rendering

A blessed and gracious Christmas to all my friends.

Politically incorrectly yours,

Bob

December 25, 2011 by
Filed Under: Christian Spirituality & Inspiration, Life, Opinion & Editorial Tagged With: , , , ,

The Field, Final Chapter: Tornado Heart

This is the last installment of my account of the drama that unfolded for a number of storm chasers, including my group of four, on May 22, 2010, in northeast South Dakota. I’ve waited to share this part because it’s personal–not a deep, dark secret, but something which until now I’ve kept to myself and a few friends. It is, however, an incident I’ve wanted to write about, and with seven months passed and Christmas just a few days away, now seems like an appropriate time to do so.

If you were one of those who were out there in the field that day, you’ll agree that we were fortunate to have escaped without injury when the outcome could easily have been quite different. Perhaps the greatest gift we have this Christmas is the fact that we’re all here to talk about our experience. You were there; you know how it was. It was a hell of a ride that has made for a story we’ll probably tell and retell the rest of our lives, but at the time there was reason to wonder just how much longer our lives would last.

For the rest of my readers, you can read my detailed account including photos here. I’ll summarize by saying that a routine move to reposition east of a violently tornadic supercell near Roscoe turned into a trap when the road–which showed as a through-road on our mapping software–dead-ended where a farmer had recently plowed it over. As tornadoes began to spin up just west of our contingent and head directly toward us, all seven or eight vehicles drove madly south along a fenceline in a desperate attempt to outmaneuver the worst part of the storm. A quarter-mile down, blocked by ponding, we turned into the field and drove another hundred yards or so until we could drive no farther. Then we parked, braced ourselves, and hoped for the best. And those who believed in a loving, watchful God, prayed. I was one of them.

I’m writing this post to thank my heavenly Father for not only responding to those prayers, but also, as I have intimated above, for letting me know in a personal and moving way that He was there with us in that field, present and protecting us all.

Spiritual topics trigger different things in different people. So let me make something plain. I write as a disciple of Jesus; I do NOT write as an emissary of contemporary Churchianity. Jesus I love, but I don’t care for much of religious culture, any more than I care for boxes of any kind. So whether you’re a Christian or a non-Christian, kindly resist the urge to stick me into a nice, tidy category that would likely say more about you than about me. I know the questions that arise surrounding answered–and unanwered–prayer. I also know the conclusions people easily arrive at, both pro and con. My purpose isn’t to address any of that in this post; rather, I am here to tell you a story and let you make of it what you will.

As Mike’s Subaru Outback bounced along the fenceline behind the vehicle in front of us, grinding its way into and out of muddy potholes, I had a good view to the west from the passenger’s seat. Rain bands spiraled and braided, hinting at unseen vortices. At one point, to my considerable consternation, I saw twin funnels wrapping around each other like a pair of dancing snakes, moving straight at us. They reminded me–I kid you not, so please don’t shoot me for saying this–of the “sisters” in the movie “Twister.” I’d estimate that their distance from us was around 150 yards. My buddy Bill Oosterbaan saw them too.

That was the moment when I realized we were not going to outmaneuver the storm, and the words “seriously screwed” took on a whole new dimension. It dawned on me that now would be an excellent time to pray, and I did, earnestly. I don’t remember my exact words, but the gist of them was that I asked God to protect us, all of us. The scenario was bathed in a strange sense of unreality, and it seemed incredible to think that I was praying for my life. But that was in fact what I was doing.

Whatever happened to those serpentine vortices I don’t know. Evidently they dissipated before they reached the fenceline. But their image lodged in my mind, and it got called back the following day in an unusual way, as you will see.

At length our caravan’s flight for safety ended in the manner I’ve already described above, and the storm descended on us in full fury. On Stormtrack, a chaser recently shared some radar images of that phase of the storm, and in one of them, you can plainly make out not just one, but two eye-like features passing directly over and just north of our location. Suffice it to say that the rotation above us was complex and broad. I remember a fierce wind that seemed to constantly switch direction, and mist driving along the ground at high velocities along with the rain. A tornado spun up briefly about a hundred feet from one of the vehicles; I didn’t see it, but Adam Lucio captured it on video* and my eyes just about popped out of my skull when I saw the clip. Daaaaamn! Any closer and…well, who knows, but it probably wouldn’t have been a pretty picture.

Fast forward past the rest of the storm and the miserable drama that ensued. It was the following day and I was sitting in a hotel room in Aberdeen. I fired up my laptop, logged into my email, and…hey, what was this? A message from my friend Brad Doll. Hmmm, cool! Brad and I rarely email each other. Curious, I opened his note.

I wish I had saved it–I thought I did, but I can’t locate it. Otherwise, I’d quote it exactly. But it’s easy enough to recreate the essence of it: “Hey, brother, just thinking of you and your love for tornadoes and thought I’d share this picture with you.–Brad”

I opened the attached file. It contained the obviously Photoshopped picture you see here of two mirror-image, snaky-looking tornadoes with a funnel dividing the clouds between them, forming a heart. You can find the image without much trouble on the Internet, but I had never seen it before. As I looked at it, the snaky double-funnels I had seen yesterday popped into my mind. The similarity was weird–not that the previous day’s very real tornado resembled a heart; the only thing it looked like was scary as hell. No, it was the overall shape of its twin vortices and the way they had appeared in relation to each other that struck me.

Then it hit me. Brad didn’t have a clue where I was. He had no idea what I’d just been through. And he had never emailed me an image file before. Not only was the communication in itself unusual, but the timing of it was…well, it was incredible.

I could feel the tears coming to my eyes as the realization sank in. This email wasn’t from Brad. Not really. Brad was just a humble and available scribe; the message was from my Father, my wonderful heavenly Father. It was His way of saying, in a simple but powerful way, “Bob, I love you!”

What I’ve just written is something I believe with all my heart. God knows us through and through. He knows what makes you, you, and me, me; and He knows how to speak to each of us intimately, in ways that touch us in deep places if we have ears to hear. Here is what I believe He was saying to me:

“Bob, when you, Tom, Bill, Mike, and the rest of the guys were fleeing along that fenceline like scared rabbits, I saw you. I heard your prayer and the prayers of all who called on Me. And I was with you. My hand covered you and my presence protected you all–because I love you all, every last man of you who was there. Today, Bob, I’m letting you know that I truly was there–that yes, it was Me–and that I carry you in my heart.”

I am not one who calls every unusual thing that happens a miracle. I believe that genuine miracles are rare, and I dislike devaluing their reality by sloppily misapplying the word. But I also believe in grace, and from time to time I have witnessed extraordinary examples of what it can do. After receiving the email from Brad, I am convinced that what happened in the field on May 22 was one of those occasions. Things could easily have turned out far worse for those of us who were there. Instead of a joyous Christmas, this year could have been one of great sadness for our loved ones, and of an empty chair at the dinner table–a chair that once was ours. But this Christmas will not be that way. We will sit down once again with our families, and we will eat, and we will exchange gifts. We will get on with the rest of winter after the holidays. And we will return to the Great Plains this coming spring to enjoy another season of chasing the storms that we love.

Just about anything can be written off as coincidence, just as almost anything unusual can be written in as a direct act of God when it wasn’t necessarily so. It’s a matter of one’s worldview. If, having read my account, you’re inclined to consider my experience just a peculiar fluke, perhaps not even all that strange, then so be it. I can’t prove differently to you and I don’t feel that I need to try. But I most definitely believe otherwise, as does my friend Brad, and Tom, and Bill, and, I am sure, at least a few others who were there in the field.

It takes faith to see God’s kingdom, and faith is perhaps best described as an extra faculty, a sixth sense that augments the first five senses. It perceives and understands differently, and sees a different and higher reality behind the stuff of our lives. It is believing, but it is also a kind of knowing that I’ve never been able to describe satisfactorily. Like the color blue, once you’ve seen it, you know what it is; but whether you’ve experienced it or not, blue is blue, and so it is with the kingdom of heaven. However accurately or inaccurately, faith is the eye that sees it.

To my wonderful Lord, Brother, and Forever Friend, Jesus, whose birth I gratefully celebrate this season: Thank you–for so much more than I can begin to tell. And to my friends and fellow storm chasers, brothers and sisters of the skies, saints, sinners, seekers, wherever your worldview stands: May your Christmas be marked by grace. And may there be great steak and good beer in store for all of us this coming year.

Merry Christmas,

Bob

__________________

* You can see Adam’s clip along with more footage from the field, plus a whole lot more, on the DVD “Bullseye Bowdle,” produced by the lads at Convective Addiction. If you enjoy storm chasing videos, this one’s the real deal–and no, the guys haven’t paid me a solitary cent to plug it here.

December 20, 2010 by
Filed Under: Christian Spirituality & Inspiration, Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Survivor Guilt: The Unseen Tornado Trauma

“The thief comes only to rob and kill and destroy; I have come that [you] may have life, and have it to the full.”–Jesus (John 10:10)

Forty-five years after he lost his younger brother in one of the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, Pete Johnson still finds it hard to talk about what happened that dreadful evening in northern Indiana. He feels responsible for his brother’s death.

The name Pete Johnson is fictitious. I doubt the man I interviewed yesterday afternoon would mind if I shared his real name or that of his brother, but my conversation with him is so fresh, and my topic so potentially sensitive, that out of care and respect I’m calling him Pete in this post.

Pete was with his family visiting an aunt and uncle in Dunlap, Indiana, when the deadliest tornado of the entire six-state outbreak swirled into view outside the picture window. As his relatives sought shelter indoors, Pete’s parents packed the kids into their car and took off down the road in a frantic attempt to outrun the tornado. They didn’t succeed. Pete’s dad told him that a house hit the car. All Pete remembers is experiencing a blow to the head and then regaining consciousness out in a field, where he’d been blown by the wind. Rescue workers rushed him off to a hospital. It would be some time before he learned that his younger brother, Mark, hadn’t survived.

Mark’s body wasn’t found until a week later, buried under debris in the devastated Sunnyside neighborhood. Pete wants to believe that his brother’s death wasn’t his fault. But still, after all these years, he wonders: What if…?

What if he’d gone straight to the car instead of hiding in the closet, as his aunt had told him to do? Maybe those few extra seconds would have saved his brother’s life. What if his family had ridden out the tornado at his aunt and uncle’s house, which sustained only minimal damage? What if…?

There’s no satisfying the what-ifs of survivor guilt. You can respond to them with your head, perhaps, but your heart doesn’t buy the answers, not when the wound goes as deep as the loss of a loved one taken by a disaster. There’s seemingly no closure, no tying off of the open ends, no last stone to turn after which the supply of unturned stones finally ceases. At the bottom of it all lies a tyrannical, perpetually haunting lie: “I’m to blame.”

People with survivor guilt suffer–and “suffer” is an appropriate word–from a form of self-imposed penance for not having been the one to perish instead of their loved one. Reliving the incident year after year, they blame themselves for failing to foresee the unforeseeable and stop the unstoppable, for not preventing things over which they had no power. Really, for not being God.

Tornadoes are quirks of the atmosphere, not so much objects as unfathomably powerful processes dependent on an ironically delicate balance of ingredients. Earlier this year I watched one take out the heart of an Illinois town, then disappear into nothingness seconds later. Like lions and Alaskan brown bears, tornadoes are magnificent but also deadly and unpredictable.

As a storm chaser, I’m captivated by the beauty and drama of tornadoes. Yet I’m also keenly aware of their dark side. Who isn’t? The human impact of tornadoes, when it occurs, is seldom conservative and often it’s wholesale. Homes blown to pieces. Trees debarked, debranched, uprooted and thrown hundreds of feet. Vehicles crumpled into balls of metal. Worst of all, bodies mangled and lives ended.

But there’s another kind of damage that can’t be seen. Long after the dead have been buried, long after houses and neighborhoods have been rebuilt, years after people have gotten on with their lives, a sadness lingers. And for many, survivor guilt haunts them. You can build a new home, you can buy a new car, but you can’t replace a loved one, and what do you do with your own wounded heart?

I believe there’s healing for those who struggle with survivor guilt. I don’t mean the sorrow of losing someone close; that will always remain, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. But the sting of guilt which serves no good purpose is exactly the kind of thing Jesus came to put an end to.

Let me be clear, as I share from a Christian perspective, that I have little interest in dogma, any more than Jesus did. The wounds that life can inflict are too real for game-playing. But just as it’s possible to glibly quote the Bible in a way that misses its meaning and heart, it’s equally possible to lightly dismiss the Bible and so miss not only its unnervingly pinpoint assessment of the human condition, but also the power and hope of the gospel for some very practical life issues.

The life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus reveal the heart of a God who desires that we should find true, deeply rooted peace in our souls that flows from the peace we have with him. For those who trust in him, Jesus has resolved the issue of guilt in all its forms, including survivor guilt, with a power and effectiveness that extend beyond the unpredictable events of our lives to a deep and certain, eternal foundation. In his execution on the cross, Jesus took everything that runs counter to the character and will of God and, absorbing it into himself as the eternal scapegoat for mortal mankind, put it to death. Then, in his resurrection, he opened the doorway to a new kind of life that is not subject to the values and limitations of this world.

This is fancy language, but for those who struggle with survivor guilt, the bottom line is simple: God looks at you and says, “Not guilty.” His heart toward you is that you should have life, not death; peace, not self-recrimination. That’s no mere religious proposition–it’s the living, breathing, passionate longing of God for your best, your freest, and your highest.

Given the reality of what God desires for you, the question isn’t whether you could have done something that might have saved your loved one. You’ll never know. That question is a deception from the devil, who loves to torment people with issues that have endless complexities and no resolution. It’s really no question at all–it’s a prison sentence and a distraction from the simplicity of faith. The true, powerful question is whether you’ll stop holding yourself accountable when God himself doesn’t, and stop beating up an innocent person whom he loves very much: yourself.

As you consider that question, here’s another one to contemplate along with it: If the situation had been reversed and you had been the one who perished while your loved one lived, would you have wanted your surviving loved one to live the rest of their days with the guilt that has haunted you? Wouldn’t you rather have desired with all your heart that he or she would think of you with love but not guilt, and fulfill the gift and potential of their life in freedom?

What you would want for your loved one would surely be your loved one’s desire for you. Love does not condemn, but frees and blesses.

I realize that what I’ve proposed is easier said than done. I just want to put the possibility before you–the seed of a new way of thinking which, I hope, can make a difference for you. I’m well aware that I haven’t experienced what you’ve experienced. My struggles have been my own. Yet they have been significant in their own right, and in the face of them, Jesus has made me a freer man as only Jesus can. So my words to you are spoken both humbly and frankly, with a longing that you should know peace at last, peace that only the love and grace of God can bring.

One of the titles by which the Scriptures call Jesus is “Prince of Peace.” The peace he offers rests not on life circumstances, but on an interpersonal relationship with him in which the quality of life that resides in him flows to us. It is a life in which guilt, shame, and torment can’t be found. If you belong to him, then the peace which is native to that life is more than his will for you–it is your very birthright as a child of God.

My prayer for you, if you struggle with survivor guilt, is that your birthright will become real to you in a way that frees you from a weight that is not really yours to carry. Bring it to Jesus and trust him with it. You don’t know what to do with it; he does. Letting him do so is a journey he’s eager to make with you if you’re willing to make it with him.

July 31, 2010 by
Filed Under: Christian Spirituality & Inspiration, Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 22 South Dakota Tornadoes: Part 3

hp-supercell-ne-of-roscoe
There’s nothing funny about finding yourself trapped at the end of a dead-end road with multiple tornadoes bearing down on you. It’s not a scenario one anticipates when heading out on a chase, but it’s the one my chase partners Bill and Tom Oosterbaan, Mike Kovalchick, and I found ourselves in, along with seven other vehicles full of chasers, last Saturday in South Dakota.

Up until the moment when the road we were on ended abruptly at the edge of a farmer’s field, we were simply performing a routine maneuver: select an escape route and take it when the storm draws near. We and the other chasers had chosen 130th Street east of CR9 as our best eastbound option. It looked good on both DeLorme Street Atlas and Microsoft Streets & Trips: a nice through road connecting with 353rd Avenue three miles away. It was a perfectly logical choice, and things would have proceeded without incident had the maps been accurate.

What the maps didn’t show was that a farmer had recently plowed over the road, converting it to a field. We made that delightful discovery two miles down. The road had already begun to degrade, presenting us with a couple mudholes which Mike’s Subaru Outback plowed through without a problem. But the field was a show stopper. Suddenly, poof! No road. On an ordinary day, this discovery would have been an inconvenience. With tornadoes breathing down our neck, it was horrifying.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backpedal a bit to set the stage. After stopping to enjoy the eminently photogenic fourth tornado that followed the beastly Bowdle wedge (see previous post), the four of us headed north to CR2/125th St., then turned east. The storm was morphing into a high precipitation supercell (photo at top of page). We watched it drop a couple more

ne-of-roscoe
rain-wrapped tornadoes. Then it pulsed, catching its breath and gathering energy for the next round.

Dropping south down CR9, we pulled aside by a roadside pond to grab a few photos. The updraft area was a couple miles to our west, and while it didn’t presently seem to be tornadic, appearance can be deceptive. The cloud base was low, nearly dragging on the ground, with suspicious lowerings forming and dissipating. It looked like it could drop something at any time, and chances are it was even then producing random, momentary spinups.

corner-of-cr9-and-130th-street
Hopping back into our vehicle, we proceeded farther south to the corner of 130th Street, where we once again parked. Here, we bumped into chasers Ben Holcomb, Adam Lucio, Danny Neal, and Scott Bennett. We had last seen these guys at a truck stop in Murdo; now here they were again, along with several other vehicles, all converging out ahead of the meso in the middle of nowhere. In the photo, left to right: Tom, Ben, Bill, and Scott.

As the storm drew closer, Tom pointed out that rotation was beginning to organize overhead. It was time to skedaddle. Back into Mike’s Outback we clambered, with Tom at the wheel, and headed east down 130th Street.

At this point, it’s important to bear in mind that every vehicle that showed up at our location had independently pre-selected 130th Street as a valid escape route. What followed did not begin as a desperate dash for safety, but as a calculated, run-of-the-mill tactical maneuver informed by commonly used mapping software. Most of the people involved were experienced chasers, some of them veterans. The reasoning behind our road choice was sound. Unfortunately, the information we based it on was not.

Thus it was was that two miles down the road, suddenly there was no road. At the front of a string of other chase vehicles, we were the first to make that

road-of-death
discovery. Tom turned around and started heading back, yelling to the next vehicles that the road was out. It was then that a tornado suddenly materialized in the field maybe half a mile to our west, just south of the road. It was a regular drill press, spinning furiously as it made its way toward us. It finally crossed the road and headed east-northeast a few hundred feet away, but even as it did so, another, thicker funnel snaked to the ground at roughly the same place where the first one had formed. I don’t think most people saw this second tornado; it moved toward us briefly, kicking up dirt, then dissipated, though I could still see swirling motions in the rain bands where it had been.

In the photo, besides the rope tornado, notice the lowerings farther back. These meant business. We were at the eastern edge of a broad area of rotation that was dropping not suction vortices, but multiple tornadoes of various sizes, intensities, and behaviors. In my observation, these were NOT moving in cyclonic fashion around a common center, but east with the parent storm–and straight at us.

A large cone appeared to the west, which, gathering strength, moved through the field to our north. By this time, it was clear that we were in a truly lethal situation, cut off to the east by a dead-end road and to the west by tornadoes.

Windy? Hell yes it was windy. The inflow was cranking like a sumbitch, and from the looks of things, it was only going to get worse. I looked around for a ditch, but there was absolutely nothing that could have offered protection. I noticed a stout post a few yards away and contemplated lying flat and wrapping my arms around it. Tom had the same idea. Mike was eyeballing a large pile of stones a hundred yards away, thinking it might provide some shelter, but it was too far a dash with no time left to make it in.

It was at this point that UK chaser Nathan Edwards drove off the road and began heading south into the field. He told me later that he was simply attempting to clear some room for other vehicles to move forward, hopefully edging just a little bit closer to out of harm’s way, but Nate’s move prompted the rest of us to follow. In a last-ditch gamble, the entire entourage of chase vehicles began fleeing south along the fence boundary.

The tornadoes were close. Really, they were on top of us. I watched as two funnels formed a hundred yards west of our vehicle, twisting around each other and moving toward us like the “sisters” in the movie “Twister.” The rain curtain was full of swirls and braids. And what was particularly unsettling was that, as we dashed across the farmland, the business part of the storm seemed to be expanding, reaching out after us. For a mindless force of nature, this storm was displaying as close as you can get to malevolent intent.

It dawned on me that if ever there was a time to pray, and pray hard, this was it. I’m a Christian–a bit of an iconoclast in that I don’t buy into a lot of Western church culture, but I love Jesus, I’m serious about following him, and conversing with God comes naturally to me. I don’t mean just in a pinch, but as a lifestyle. You can bet that at this point, I began praying most intensely.

A couple hundred yards in, we encountered a wet area and ponding and were forced to forge our way into the cultivated field. It was there that the storm caught up with us in earnest. End of the road for real. There was nothing left to do now but hunker down, pray, and hope.

Obviously I’m here to tell the story. All of us are, every last person. That none of us were killed or seriously injured, or for that matter sustained  so much as a scratch, is in my book God’s love and mercy, pure and simple. A video clip by Adam Lucio shows a tornado forming right in our midst, not ten yards from one of the vehicles. I never saw it, but Adam’s video is conclusive and sobering. We came so close, so very close. The rear flank downdraft alone had to have been in the order of 100 miles an hour. Yet nothing truly bad happened to any of us.

Some may call that a lucky draw; I call it answered prayer. Believe what you will, but there’s more to the story, an experience uniquely mine that I’ve shared with only a couple people so far. Look for it in my upcoming, final post concerning this incident. Whatever you make of it, I think you’ll agree that it’s uncanny.

in-the-field
That’s it for now, but this story continues. What followed with the farmer who owned the field, the sheriff and police, and other locals is for another episode, and it’s still not entirely resolved.

I’ll leave you with two images, both taken when the worst of the storm had just moved past us. One shows some of the vehicles getting slammed by the still-hellacious RFD. The other is a GR3 radar grab of the rotation and our location relative to it, shown by the circular GPS marker.

With that, I’ll sign off. Keep an eye out for parts four and five.

tornado
May 28, 2010 by
Filed Under: Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Christmas Meditation on Jesus

Can it really be that I’ve experienced 53 Christmases?

Magical Christmases of my childhood, filled with anticipation and Santa Claus and toys. Conspiratorial Christmases of my older boyhood, wherein, having been initiated into the truth about Santa, I now assisted my parents in the clandestine placement of gifts under the tree. Teenage Christmases, tinged with both family warmth and family struggles. So many Christmases.

As I write, I’m wrestling with a nasty chest cold and am not in the frame of mind to write a lengthy, well-worded post. So I thought I’d share something with you from the past.

The following is something I wrote two years ago on Christmas Eve, 2007, in my MySpace blog. Many things have changed since then. Significantly, my beautiful best friend, Lisa, has entered my life, and I am no longer alone. But the essence of what I had to share back then hasn’t changed, not for me and very likely not for you, my reader. Without wasting more words, then, I give you…


Christmas Eve. As an older single male, age fifty-one and counting, I’m spending it alone.

I would like to say that in reality, I am not alone—and really, that is the case. My Lord is with me. Jesus.

But when it comes to polishing off a large bowl of chili (heated to a well-seasoned glow by a sub-lethal dose of Dave’s Insanity Sauce), followed by a generous helping of spaghetti, all designed to take the edge off a bottle of 9 percent ABV old ale and another bottle of 11.5 percent Trappist ale…well, the work has been strictly mine. No one sits with me in my humble, though comfortable, apartment to make supper and the partaking of craft brew a shared effort. I am by myself—as are many who will read these words.

Yet, as I have said, He is here. Here in these modest digs of a solitary, middle-aged male. And because He is here with me, I trust He is also there with you, wherever you are, whatever your circumstances may be. Some of you are grieving the loss of a loved one. Others are simply experiencing, like me, another “single” Christmas Eve by yourself. You have friends, and if you’re fortunate, you have family, and you’re thankful. But there’s still something missing, isn’t there?

It’s all right. He is here with you and me. Emmanuel, “God with us.” And in a strange way, those of us who feel sorrow, or loneliness, or a poignant emptiness in this Season of Light, may be closest of all to the heart and soul of what Christmas is truly about.

For you see, that little baby who was born into the lowliest of circumstances two thousand years ago didn’t come for the sake of inspiring cozy traditions, or warm exchanges of gifts by the fireside, or happy family meals. No. Those things are wonderful, and I wouldn’t detract from them for anything. But their absence in the lives of so many of us lies closer to the reason Jesus was born. He came not because this world is so wonderful, but because it was, and is, so broken. He came for those of us who long for a place called “home.” He came for the lonely, for the disenfranchised, for less-than-perfect you and me who know firsthand the meaning of loss, and tears, and struggle; who long for something more in life. He came to give us that “something more.” He came because he knows how deeply we long—and need—to be truly, safely, securely, and lastingly loved.

I write with all the freedom that a couple bottles of high-potency ale can inspire, tempered by my editorial instincts and guided by my heart, which is consumed with Him. But who is He? In this day of well-publicized “new discoveries” of the same tired old heresies that have sought for centuries to recreate a more convenient Jesus, the marketplace of ideas abounds with options.

I just Googled the name “Jesus,” and on the first page of search results I find the following:

* three full-color graphic images of Jesus

* a Wikipedia article

* a “Christmas Jesus Dress Up”

* a YouTube clip of Jesus singing “I Will Survive”

* an online Catholic encyclopedia article on Jesus

* a  BBC news article that begins, “A statue of the infant Jesus on display near Miami in Florida is being fitted with a Global Positioning System device after the original figurine was stolen.”

Clever, all very clever. But when you’re alone on Christmas Eve, cleverness doesn’t really cut it, does it? For so many of us who are by ourselves tonight, the one thing we long to know is that we’re really not alone. The older we get, the more that matters.

So perhaps, after we’ve wearied our clever minds exploring all the alternatives, the Jesus of the Bible really is what we’re looking for after all—because of all the gods available in today’s spiritual shopping mall, He is the only one who has come looking for us in a way that is consistent with someone who cares not about religion, but about us. To  be born in our midst and commit a lifetime to experiencing everything about the human condition, from inglorious start to brutal finish, certainly smacks of a genuine and very personal investment.

Christmas is God’s way of acknowledging what all of us instinctively know (though we try so hard to argue otherwise): that this world is fractured, splintered. That we are lonely. That we are lost. That we long for something more.

Christmas is God’s way of saying, “My loved ones have lost me, and I have lost them. And that is unacceptable to me.”

This Christmas…you are not alone. I am not alone.

Jesus came for us.

If you’ve screwed up your relationships, Jesus came for you.
If you’ve been sexually abused, Jesus came to clothe you with dignity and hope.
If you’re lonely, He came to give you a place at the family table.
If you’ve been betrayed or abandoned, He came to hold you gently with arms that will not be removed.
If you’re_______, He came to fill in the blank with something better than emptiness.

This Christmas…we are deeply loved.

So to you, my friends, however you may believe and whatever your circumstances may be…

May He fill this time with the reality, the glory, and the comfort of Himself…

Have a blessed Christmas.

Storm

December 24, 2009 by
Filed Under: Church Worship, Life, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,