It's About Life Being Valiant feb 23
The Winter Holidays work for a long list of reasons, but mostly because it Sings the Song of LIFE - in the midst of cold and unfriendly days each year where all is dead or domant. At such times, life is not merely charming, or warming - it is VALIANT.
Maybe that is why we love the story of Jesus so much - a really special new life, one that changed the world, delivered in the middle of difficulty. Valiant - a thing made more beautiful and clear because adversity did not dim its lights and actually made those lights shine all the brighter !
During a time where, in most of the world, people suffer from the cold its discouragement, this wonderful new life came to join us and show us the way. So, instead of hiding out or quitting or crying or stopping our work, we use the cold months as a generator of warmth, of insight, of triumph.
One day, as a girl, an uncle with farmer skills told me, as I asked why he was shining up his tools, when it was snowing and nothing doing, " In Winter is JUST when we do these things, and we study the catalogs ,buy the seeds and more, so when Spring comes, we will be ready and our tools and our plantings ready too!" I carried that loving chat with me till this day to share now with you...just a beautiful thing to brighten gray days. And he learned the way to use winter, in days when the Depression made such fidelity to life a valiant thing.
In college we learned easier lessons: the winter months might inspire our best works - the challenge of the cold reduces heat's stupefying way - and opens the eyes and the mind. Clear cold lights are sometimes the best! Every glance says death or sleeping till spring, but not us - we breathhhhhhe in the challenge and breathe out fire of the mind and heart and the soul. Every beat of our heart is winning argument against death itself. Is that why we believe in pursuing long life?
