GLOW

I’m writing this on Christmas Eve. I kept waiting for the “mood” to hit me and for the emotion that I feel to well up in and through so that my fingers would weep…so that you would hear my fingers weeping. 

I learned to type when I was 17. Letters were like notes on a keyboard, allowing the rhythm of what was felt to pour out of me and onto paper as fast as the love, anger, sadness or whatever I was feeling or sensing would rise and then, somewhere, about half way down the page, begin to even out and steady. 

We all have so much raw emotion in us now. We are traveling across a desert in search of the light and we see ourselves as anything but steady. And we are weary. But we are so much more than than the least of ourselves that we fixate on.

We are breath. We are light. We are naked and fearful. We are impatient and imperfect and yet, gazing upon us, Heaven still dances with delight. 

I can’t imagine celebrating a Christmas Eve without inviting the Creator of the Universe to the party. Or perhaps I have that backwards. He has invited me. He sees the stripped down version, the one that we all are behind closed doors, and still He eagerly opens the door and draws us in.

“You are glowing,” someone said upon seeing this very recent image of me.  

Glowing. 

Do we really have the potential to glow [to give off a steady light without flame] even in our weakest moment, even without effort or determination to do so?  

I question…and then I imagine that star we’ve all been seeing in the evening sky.  We are fire, are we not, bent on a lifespan of 30,000 days? We burn with the passion of a light soaring through space and time, insistent on a legacy that pierces the boundaries of our own mortality.

No matter the obstacle, our trajectory is set into motion: the passion and purpose embedded in us is unstoppable.

You are glowing. I see it in you. I hear it in your words, poured out in anger and angst. Your voice is cloaked in the trappings of a hurting world that refuses to look up. 

Still, there is a star piercing the winter sky. The snow falls and melts. The lake surges and stills. Even in darkness. Even as we sleep life races and rages.

Sometimes, and now more often, I wake before the light and wonder that the things once so routine are no longer even on my radar. 

Those who long for the “magic of Christmas” to prove itself more reality than legend have been presented with new evidence aligning in cosmic perfection. A star on the radar.

Just when we [humanity] need it most, that is to say some glimmer that God is near, the planets align and the whole world glows.

There is this radiance that dwells within us. Stripped of the things on which we brood and fixate we become more fragile and essential, more useful and light. Goodness and light. 

A star. A star. Dancing in the night. With a tail as big as a kite.