Aftermath

Up and down the streets of our town, the dawn’s light reveals discarded Christmas trees, abandoned at the curb alongside the trash cans, like prehistoric carcasses littering the wintry landscape.  What once was center-stage the focus of beauty and admiration has been stripped of its adornments and cast aside with an incriminating trail of still-pungent dark green needles heading down the front walk.    “That was a nice one,” we remarked, “better than most,” we eulogized as we disposed its dead body for the garbage truck to pick up on its weekly rounds.  And in its place inside, there now appears an empty corner, imperfect and lacking.

Bereft of Christmas decorations, the mantle looks bare, the doors so plain, the living room with a cavernous hole, the site of the tree now occupied by a single widowed chair, a poor substitute for the magnificent eight-foot evergreen.  Equally barren, the new year stands before us, cluttered already by a few plans and scheduled events penciled in, always and forever subject to monumental change.  Like our now-emaciated living rooms, there are empty places ahead of us in this newest of years, things that we cannot see yet from here, and perhaps even then, we will not be able to fathom.

And it becomes not a matter of us laying our year before the LORD for Him to fill in the cracks and reinforce our plans like so much scaffolding, but letting Him reveal HIS year for us.  One day at a time.  Because when it is HIS year or HIS day we pursue, even an interruption takes on new significance.  We see our days with different eyes.  It is not a matter of filling up life, but Him fulfilling ours, a year of great possibilities and even greater purpose.

Now to Him

who by the power at work within us

is able

to do far more abundantly

than all we ask or imagine….

                  Ephesians 3.20