Christmas lights

Photo by Brian Suh on Unsplash

I love driving through the flat, wide-open farm country of northwestern Ohio.

From Interstate 75, I can see for miles in every direction.

I enjoy the view on a clear day under a blue sky, when I feel like I’m smooth sailing across an ocean of soybean fields.

But I like it even more at night. It gets so dark and empty in every direction (including up), it feels like driving on the other side of the moon.

Every holiday season, we drive through that black void when we come home to Michigan from visiting family in Tennessee.

In that dark, freezing, infinite emptiness, I find one of my favorite sights in life and that sight fills me with one of my favorite feelings.

Yes, in that dark, freezing, infinite emptiness, I always spot a house far off in the distance, miles from the interstate. I can’t see the house, but I can see its Christmas lights. Each one of those lights is no bigger than a TicTac, but its tiny ray shines across miles of negative space to make my eyes twinkle.

I imagine the people inside that home with the Christmas lights.

Do they have a Christmas tree? A fire in the fireplace? Are they gathering in the family room to eat Thanksgiving dinner leftovers while they watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?

From my car window, miles away, that home might as well be the International Space Station suspended in an airless, lifeless vacuum. But behind those tiny, twinkling lights–so far off in the distance I can barely see them–I know there is life and light and love and warmth.

To me, that makes the cold, dark emptiness more than bearable; it makes it beautiful. I would miss the beauty of those lights if not for the darkness.

Christmas–indeed, the entire Christ story–is not about the absence or even the end of darkness. It is the story of lights flickering in the darkness.

It is the story of tiny lights twinkling out a sermon that life and light, love and warmth are always there for us. Even when it is so dark and we are so far out in the middle of nowhere we might as well be on Pluto.

Winter is cold and dark and silent, but the Christmas lights redeem it to make it part of something alive and beautiful, hopeful and joyful.

The Christmas lights are preaching the Gospel.

When you look at the Christmas lights you can feel it for yourself that the Gospel is true. Joy to the world indeed.

Grace and peace.