Christmas Gift

Sheffield, MD
Christmas Eve

They were on their way home from the Christmas Eve service at the little nondenominational church he had frequented since his graduate work … and that was years ago already, before the first few gray hairs had appeared in his still sandy–blonde hair. Jon Anthony turned down the main street of their town, which was home to the acclaimed Britteridge College where he now enjoyed tenure.

“Oh, the lights! Can you see, girls?” Mary, beside him in the front seat of their Honda Accord, asked, swiveling toward the back.

“Yeah, Mom.”

He saw Gracie was enjoying their tour of the light shows across town. Some neighborhoods did better than others, but Sheffield’s main thoroughfare was known for the work the town businesses put forward in a yearly contest of outdoing themselves and each other in a seasonal display of illuminated decorations. Her sister, however, seemed less enthused.

Jon glanced in the rearview to confirm Faith was strapped in her riser seat. No, she was not happy. “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” Fay attempted in her usual stoic monotone that was a dead giveaway she was holding something back.

“Kiddo, you know that’s not allowed. We talk. Remember the rule?” Mary reminded their daughter.

Jon glanced at the mirror again. Faith was getting That Knowing Look from her sister; one they shared when busted.

“It’s not Christmas, Daddy.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Mary cock her head and glance his way. This was his territory. For a decade, he’d been teaching Comparative Religion up on The Hill, not to speak of the books and speaking tours and regular television appearances as a commentator that were offshoots of this life he had somehow been gifted. To parent was to teach, and its return was tallied in a currency far beyond a salary. “What isn’t Christmas, sweetie?” he prodded in a gentle voice.

Fay pointed. “Look, on the light pole. It’s a penguin.” She picked out another decoration on the other side of the street. “And that’s a snowman. And there’s a wrapped present ….“

Yes. Jon saw the problem that was growing in his daughter’s young mind.

“At school you took us to a Holiday Party. “

Yes, I did. Mary had a look of concern on her face now, but this conversation was still his, and though he saw Gracie was paying attention as well, both of them were staying on the sidelines. “You’re not wrong, Fay.”

“It makes me sad is all.”

“And that’s okay, honey.” Jon drew a contemplative breath. His daughters’ questions about the season were answered early in their lives, as he and Mary made clear the hierarchy ordering their existence and the expectations their children were to follow through what certainly could be a maddeningly disappointing world.

Britteridge College, regardless of the lengths the institution had gone through to keep him on board after events early in his career, remained a liberal arts college. The hints of woke activism of a few years ago had blossomed into what was becoming a philosophical pathology Dr. Jon Anthony knew he would confront sooner or later on campus, if not in his own classroom. Yet, as ever, today’s the thing.

Jon glanced back to Fay again. “I have a question.” He met her eyes in the mirror when they returned, then gestured at the light displays hung up, down, and across the business district. “These aren’t always here, are they?”

“No.” his daughter answered in an unsure tone of voice.

“And even when they were hung up there they weren’t what they are right now, were they? What had to happen first?”

“It had to get dark.”

Not what I was getting at, but isn’t she right, though? Jon smiled. “And then what happened?”

Fay thought for a second as Gracie looked her way and smiled too. “Someone had to turn them on.”

“There you go.” They reached the end of Main Street and turned toward the Historical District, where the same little house they’d always known waited for all of them. Soon, the secular influences of practical people overly concerned with diversity and inclusion and avoiding offended seekers of lame advantage gave way … first to a star, then a creche, and then the bright red and white “MERRY CHRISTMAS” that always marked the house Dean Mills lit up for the season.

“It can be a dark world, honey. Be a worker in light,” he encouraged, checking the mirror and his daughters again. “And you both know how to do that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Daddy,” they said together. He knew they meant it. He caught Mary settling back to grant him another approving look, as one more lesson was deposited into his legacy. He knew—in the conscious awe of appreciation—how he and they had been blessed.

The world was what it was. It was the reason Jesus had been here, and remained here with them, just as He’d promised, even to the end of the age. For the Anthony family at least, Christmas was the gift.

Choose to love, and Merry Christmas! -DA

Christmas Is

Christmas is fast approaching as I write this. The thirty-fifth deployment of the Perimeter’s little tree is complete, and it again stands guard over both artfully and man-wrapped gifts. Its accompanying stuffed Christmas Moose and Penguin are intermittently on station when not being abducted and abused by Kitteh Leo, who is also responsible for one of the Editress’s ceramic ornaments not being quite what it was last year.

Music by Elvis, Mannheim Steamroller and others pervades the ambiance. Die Hard has been viewed already, featuring the annual Dropping of the Hans and remembrance of those lost in 1988 at the Nakatomi Tower. The Season is here.

There are many answers one might garner when asking others what Christmas is. Some will be hostile and defensive, projecting a spittled tirade shot through with the false premises guiding those who revile this time of year. As with every good thing, there are those who just don’t understand.

It’s a federal holiday, a long weekend, and a time for family. It’s the medieval institutionalization of the pagan observance of the Winter Solstice rebranded in a new paradigm by the early Church as Christianity gained dominance via western civilization’s governing hierarchy. Yes, Christmas is all those things. But it’s more.

Christmas is rooted in the historical appearance of the Christ Child. The birth of Jesus is celebrated at the end of December out of tradition, though Scripture hints of His arriving during the Feast of Tabernacles occurring in the fall instead. History is what it is, and all of its distracting errata cannot overshadow the fact that He arrived, just as it cannot hide the truth that He Was, and Is, and Is To Come. Without Jesus, it and we are emptied of what matters most.

That foundational premise comprises a hard stop for unbelieving souls: the Holiday Season crowd, happy to partake in days off and satisfied to celebrate materialism, themselves, or whatever else in the human experience they feel should occupy our attention instead. The Christmas Spirit is a Christian Spirit, being an outgrowth of the essential orientation of faith, as are many other attributes of life being lived as it should. We proceed, faith says, in a binary system of ones and zeroes, with every aspect of our existence being within or in opposition to the Will of God.

My writing started with my character Jon Anthony, in whose theology he espoused a “reduction to essence” which, as such luminaries as Lao Tzu and Winnie the Pooh agreed, begins at the beginning. Our essential orientation defines us, being a set of unavoidable and existential questions we answer in our actions if not contemplation. In those, we have two patron spirits vying for our affiliation; their hallmarks are vitality or decay, nurture or predation, connection or isolation, love and hate, and many other opposites. Every choice made is dominated by a spirit of light or darkness, with valid faith being the determinate factor of each turn toward fulfillment or folly. It’s not much of a mystery which patron benefits us most: it’s the one Who wishes us at each juncture to live rather than die.

History is a resource presenting us the opportunity to grow via the life lessons of others rather than relying on our own limited experience, and as such attending or ignoring the opportunity is another of the binary choices we all must make. And the history of the Christian experience, an appearance which was delayed into historical times, is one on which we can rely.

We can reference, through Roman historians long passed into eternity, confirmation of the Census of Quinirius in the years of Augustus that prompted the travel of Joseph’s new family to Bethlehem. Likewise, the later ministry of the Christ Child grown into manhood would be documented by Josephus in his tome The Jewish Wars. Christmas Is because Jesus Is, and we who have looked into the subject have rational assurance of all these events rather than needing to take any of them on blind faith, as the faithless accuse. But to see these things one must look, while the distraction from that search is the goal of every effort of the enemy. Every experience derives from the victory of one or another of the two competing spirits who vie for us all; spiritually, politically, and personally.

Observance is telling once one understands. The Spirit bestows the gift of what the Greeks called Diakrisis, the discernment of spirits. It can be a burden to see people from the inside out. There you’ll find inflamed, self-inflicted wounds, the fever of guilt, and addiction to premises that poison the mind before they infect the soul. But the joy of recognizing love’s driving force is there to discover as well, and the hope of healing one to the other is what keeps our walk of faith vital and relevant.

To live as we’re meant, we need to understand all we can, and there’s no better time of year to begin. Christmas presents, you see, cannot compete with Christmas Presence. Understood in its fullness, the season never has to end. There is strength there to be had through simple recognition of The Way Things Are, blinding as its initial insight might be.

Your inner eye will adjust. Trust me … and then trust Him with everything.

Merry Christmas. Choose to love. -DA

*****

In production news, the Editress is somewhere in the vicinity of forty percent through production editing of Boone’s concluding novel, Two Years with Master Quan. Our favorite redhead’s first and last adventure, set during her postdoctoral studies in Vietnam and featuring Thibaut, Quan, and others, will appear next year as God is willing. If you’ve not yet been, her previous six novels are a trip worth the time.

Christmas 2020

Those who have remained there had a storm back home. I don’t know if you’ve ever endured a blizzard on the High Plains, but there nothing quite like it. As inhospitable environments go, it offers disorientation, wind-whipped crystals that sting one’s skin when they hit, howling wind, and temperatures that will kill you dead if you’re caught unprepared.

Blizzards are a very real thing. It’s better to stay somewhere safe, warm and sheltered with someone who loves you, if one is blessed. Blizzards bring their baby booms in late summer, and the resultant children will hear the story for the rest of their parents’ lives.

I just saw a Facebook meme: “On January 1st, hindsight really will be 2020.” My comment: “And good riddance.”

2020 was a storm. Not a sudden onslaught like the wall cloud that brings a South Dakota thunderstorm or the rolling waves of horizontal snow comprising its blizzards, nor the steady building rainfall that precedes the torrent of a hurricane. This year was a steady deluge of another sort of precipitate.

It didn’t start with a virus. It started somewhere deeper in the makeup of people than their physiology. It’s unique to us, as creatures formed in the image of a living God and fixed in the eye of His mind before we ever were.

Did you ever wonder why He bothers? Why this place, why people such as us? Why a world so intricately crafted life could hardly be sustained otherwise? Why do storms come?

In the beginning, God chose not to be alone. Better to commune, He must have decided, than to remain a singularity of consciousness. He conceived love, which necessitated an object and ideally evoked reciprocation. It couldn’t be innate, but needed to be a choice, as His was a choice. In that moment of pre-time, He became the Craftsman, and all which we know followed.

The Editress and I have been students of history since before we met, and that was a long enough time ago. The history she and I learned by and large isn’t taught these days but in home school, and for good reason: the primary lesson of history is a stark exposition of our innate human nature. While times change, people do not, and the cycles of human experience confirm the same store of wisdom even as history’s tides ripple against the vessel carrying us forward in the present day.

The lesson of history is that people generally do not learn from history, just as the lesson of Scripture is that we are inescapably bound to a sin nature in our physical form. These aren’t separate lessons. They are one and the same.

The opportunism that manifested in 2020 sprang into the open hearts of men in response to the whispering of God’s enemy, who loves nothing more than to convince his victims of their cleverness. One line of inspiration from a patron spirit (one who, by the way, out of hate wants every one of us dead) might inspire, for example, a strategy to concurrently evolve a potentially fatal malady and its vaccine as a means to pursue wealth.

Fearmongering, the polar opposite of faithful living enabled by the onset of a coronavirus, then merged with social engineering to provide a means of imposing their will for those with deep-seated control issues. Fear confers the short-term gratification of accumulated power comprising the opiate of tyrants, and the only fix for its junkie is furthering the compliance of subjects.

Deep-seated control issues virtually define the political Left. Vice of all sorts is literally the driving force of mentalities repulsed by responsible living in the Real World. No less governed by intractable natural laws in their rebellion, they are the idiot children of comfortable living, and the weak folk who produce bad times out of good years. And they had a president who rubbed their noses in their own ineffectiveness by outperforming them at every turn.

Something simply had to be done, no matter how irrational or immoral, and those stabilizing concepts hardly registered on souls so lost as to consider reality something to be engineered rather than accommodated. “Action Now! The ends will justify our means!”

That’s what gave us 2020. What a crap pile of a year. Way to go, kids.

Somewhat more than half us see what’s going on. Somewhat less than that realize the full extent of the present day, and those of us who know what’s coming next are an earthly population of precisely zero.

In all the camps contending for dominance, we break down into two essential categories. Some of us hang onto hope while others do not.

Hopelessness makes the political Left vulnerable to promises of secular salvation, of the freedom to indulge in base desires, and in the illusion of there being no accountability to the laws of Nature and the judgment of their Author. Natural law decrees unguarded vulnerability will often not end well.

Hope didn’t happen by accident. The Craftsman, present throughout the whole of His creation and unbounded by the line of time, knows our nature far better than we can perceive ourselves in this life. His love in creating those who could choose to love Him in return necessitated accommodation in the relationship, to balance the sum of who He is and what we are.

This eternal God from the beginning knew forgiveness would be part of what He was doing, were it to happen at all. Love made that choice, and in that aspect of Divine nature is all the hope we need to navigate the present day.

God is good, all the time. It pleases Him to inspire our hope, to buttress it with courage, and to witness works of faithfulness that defy the whispers of the enemy, and then his voice, and even his raging bellow. Faith will be here after the storm is past, just as the Craftsman—the same yesterday, today and tomorrow forever—has ever been and ever shall be.

The hope available to you was brought about by the choice of a simple, wonderful girl long ago, who said in faith “Let it be done to me according to Thy will.” Jesus appeared, and His witnesses carried the Good News into the world. He knew we needed something to hang onto when the storms would come. So stay inside, dear child of God, and warm yourself here.

Choose to love, and Merry Christmas. -DA

Decades

It’s a season of transition. As always, only this year the changes are more stark.

Fall gives way to winter. Life focuses on the joy of the season, and a new year beckons afterward. Quibbling over Anno Domini reckoning aside, in this turn another decade ends as well.

If everything has gone as it should, because we have that many fingers the years group into tens as well, and order into the chapters of one’s life. Childhood. School. The Social Order. The Path. The Mission. The Changes. Eventually, The End Game.

I’ve been writing in ten of these most recently passed years, as I was purposed to do when they started. I was a child when they sat me in the pews of my local parish to stare at a sanitized image of Jesus on the Cross, and I thought how unfair it was that he had done nothing, but hung there for the sake of us, who should serve Him.

I was only a young man when times were bad, so bad yet so inescapable that I offered times such as those to Him, if He had a use for me. He did, as He does for all who believe in the magic of Christmas and the blessing of Easter. Afterward, the decades turn, His will is done, and we see more clearly all of it in hindsight than we are able in looking forward at the road ahead.

My lead characters Jon and Sean and Boone were given and changed that life. What was now is not, and it seems that the year in which I wanted to write was turned instead into seven of some sort of indenture, in which I was utilized to finish what was started.

This, due to the nature of transition that took us from where we were to where we are, unfortunately will be The Year Without a Novel. 2020, God willing, will bring Boone and Sean together in short order followed by another title of his. Afterward, a sixth for Sean and Boone’s first and last adventure will round out the catalog, should that be His plan as well.

Will I write another novel? I don’t know, just as I didn’t imagine more than a single effort in the first place. I am open to being used to a greater extent, and I am satisfied that I have been the conduit of what has come across already. Life should be lived in just such a manner of faith and contentment.

I know that in the pews of my childhood parish I wanted to be on His side, because even then, though I couldn’t yet articulate the intuition, I knew His work to be life, founded in love. Those greater premises took more than half my allotted years to formulate into relatable precepts. Now they are out in the world, in the nearly fifty-four thousand extant copies of the works people call mine.

I know it not to be so. The Editress is there, and the refinement of helpers and friends who want to be a part of what we were and are yet doing. Behind us all is the voice of the Spirit and the greater plan of Creation, being followed to perfection through those who believe and the others who do not.

Christmas celebrates only the first installment of His validation of belief. Jesus had to appear to assure us that we are not struggling through the chapters of this life in vain. He had to do so in a historical era to be documented not only by His followers but in the writings of the very Romans who hung him on the same sort of Cross as I contemplated in my youth.

Without the assurance that He experienced what it was to be alone and blind and dying, we might otherwise be tempted to make the excuse that He does not. Another device allowing bitterness a root in our souls rather than the assurance of His shepherding is thwarted. That excuse is gone.

Decades turn, and the world changes while we move through it. The hope He provided remains, as it has now for nearly two millennia and shall until He returns. Hope brings joy in its understanding. Mine is that you’re here with me this Christmas season.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

In production news, Boone and Ritter’s upcoming title, Ghosts of the Republic, stands at roughly eighty percent completion in production editing. Several weeks remain in editing, proofing and production, but it’s finally getting close. Prepare now for snug winter reading!

Mere Christianity

The themes of the holiday season, being appreciation in Thanksgiving and joy in celebration of the first Christmas, coincide with weather encouraging long, cozy nights indoors. Such times seem tailor made for books generally and edifying reads in particular, and as an author I hope all of you are indulging yourselves that way.

My November absorption was an overdue study of the 1952 classic by the renowned C.S. Lewis, titled in his devout understatement Mere Christianity. In this work, the masterful Lewis provides wonderful and insightful commentary on the basic tenets of Christian faith held in commonality by those who believe. It is rightly considered an essential read for all of us who realize ourselves to be between Here and There.

Substantive enough that it deserves to be taken on one chapter at a time, with each being followed by contemplation in turn, Lewis assures, convicts, and comforts. Personally, I perceived evident hints of his formative influence on another convincing apologist, Josh McDowell, who like Lewis also started from a base of skepticism.

Those recognizable precepts made clear that this book had influenced my own perspective years previous to my finally engaging the thing. In a sense, C.S. Lewis is another of my literary fathers, and with me, through McDowell, helped produce my catalog of novels. Expressing in fiction the seeds of faith I’ve been allowed to present through the lives of my characters Jon, Sean, and Boone is therefore partially their legacy as well. Such is the work of the Spirit.

Like Lewis, my character Jon Anthony sought to emphasize commonalities of faith rather than spur conflict in outlining divergence. Their respective efforts similarly proceeded from a peaceful nature, the bestowment of which is a core value and benefit of embracing Christianity. Such descends from the essential motivation of our Creator, which is love. Love was born in the mind of God, who then realized his desire for servants and souls with whom He could share the best of all emotions.

Everything else followed. Love, necessarily a choice, has a dependency on free will, the unfortunate application of which gives rise to sin rather than harmony. All things nurturing and charitable proceed from it, and we rightly celebrate those each holiday season and whenever else the proper mindset allows.

Mere Christianity is eminently worthwhile. Regardless of your state of belief you should read it for yourself as a life task and initiative of spiritual edification.

A personal side benefit of digesting the work was an insight as to the nature of truth. Actualities, you see, and particularly those from which Lewis constructs his arguments, are and were always here. Truth, as does the existence of a personal Creator, endures in an essential state of being. Those exist independent of discovery, acceptance, promulgation, or consensus. Truths of the physical plane discovered and undiscovered through science, for instance, are in effect independent of anyone being aware of them. In that way, physical and spiritual laws share an essential commonality. It is in their embrace that we grow our perspective and build a more useful outlook beyond the data set from which we previously proceeded.

It is this aspect of useful truth inviting embrace that led to the Great Commission, and the efforts of Lewis, and afterward McDowell, and then myself. Everything true directs toward sure knowledge of the nature of its Craftsman: the motivating love of the Father, the accommodating forgiveness of the Son, and the unrelenting outreach of the Spirit through whom we commune with Him from this world we know.

As is so eloquently expressed in Mere Christianity, what He does has the goal of successfully delivering us to our Creator. Should one understand nothing else of His Will, that would be enough of a beginning to launch a life lived as it should be. Remember one precept, descending from the apostle Paul’s commendation to the Bereans, who searched Scripture nightly to confirm the things he told them were so: truth fears nothing from inspection.

So it is each holiday season, as in the dawn of another day: a fresh chance to begin appears again. Like truth, the opportunity is always there, waiting to be picked up, held dear, and carried forward. You have our wishes for a Merry Christmas and the best of New Years from everyone here at Single Candle Press.

Choose to love, -DA

*****

Just a reminder that all three of my series—Jon’s Trilogy, Sean’s File, and Boone’s File—now have a free gateway title available through links on the sidebar if one uses an e-reader. Those collections of novels I have connived to support and enhance each other, as each takes place in its own decade of the same literary universe.

Reading material in any form, though, makes a great gift, one with the potential to move forward from then on with the mind it encounters. Should you think enough of my writing to pass it on to another, thank you in advance!

Because He Arrived

It’s a continual challenge in an overly accessorized world to effectively relay the significance of the mission of Christ. People, by and large blessed by a successful society and subject to many distractions, are able to ignore their primal nature and focus on less significant matters. But that Jesus appeared is a historical actuality, and one should understand why.

The Christ Child didn’t arrive because God changed in any way, but because He chose to manifest Himself in the person of a begotten son. The Craftsman is the same from age to age, existing outside the line of time in what can only be termed as nontemporal superdimensionalism. It is an altogether singular existence, dependent on nothing else. He is, and so he told Moses His name: I Am.

He Is today as He was then. We, as a portion of His portfolio, observe what He is doing as our limits allow. Time passes, because we are encapsulated and subject to the Line of Time, while we learn and grow to His purpose. In the fullness of our days, we will return to Him—going back under the Hand and the Eye of the Craftsman—to be evaluated.

My first novel, The Anvil of the Craftsman, led with His promise from Isaiah 43:25 that “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions, for My own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” That’s Who He is.

God’s covenantal promise is to reconcile the difference between who He is and who we are in the only way He is able. He needs to balance His equation, working in a manner that is representable mathematically. He chose to do so in a way that in its nature addresses another of our predictable failures.

Nontemporal superdimensionalism was not a term likely to flourish in the first century, let alone the times before the Hebrews became Israel. Though the concept is intuitive, humanity’s grasp of the universe was limited. We had an excuse, seeded by doubt from His enemy, that God didn’t know what it was like to be alone and abused and dying. From the beginning, in the crossroads of our minds where our voice and that of God and the deceiver meet, there was the premise planted of our Creator as a tyrant rather than a Father.

Jesus arrived, because our last excuse could be countered in no other way. I emphasize again: nothing changed then. This is the way God Is. His revelation is progressive, not His nature, and he judges men and women today on the same basis He has ever.

We are judged on a perfect standard, as He is perfect, for the reason that He must maintain, as we are told, what He creates. To do so, He must remain as He is, undiminished. It is our great opportunity and danger to arrive in eternity as a child of God or a castaway perceiving too late the nature of our existence and His.

So it is we initially fear God, and do so in our clarity. By His will, we come closer to see a message being not one of tyranny, but relaying His motivation of divine love, and His saving grace, and the overwhelming sufficiency of Christ.

Because Jesus arrived, we may understand. Join us in celebration if this is your first season of realization, and be blessed this Christmas as we remember again.

Choose to love, -DA

Advent, revisited

I am re-posting this piece from two years ago, since in the intervening time I’ve not been able to do better. From everyone at Single Candle Press: have a Merry Christmas and a blessed 2015. -DA

*****

Bethlehem, Judea
The Census of Quinirius in the years of Augustus

Two men, clad in white, walked a hill overlooking the town. The night, as always outside a camp or the confines of a town, was quiet and cold. Only the moon and stars provided what light broke the darkness. One of those this night shone brightly enough that the shadows, however, held little dominion.

The praise that had taken place was over, and the only witnesses had been the shepherds and their flocks bedded down in these hills. There was time for reflection now, and for walking, and to learn.

One of the two was very old, though his steps were not heavy with age. The other was less so. He had been apprenticed only shortly before the blessed event, and there was still so much that he did not understand. They stepped, but the sandy ground did not show their tracks. They seemed to shine with a light from within, but the luminance cast no shadow. They were here in the land of David, but the lesser of the two felt as if they were also not here. It was not the first such feeling that had come in his new time.

“Friend,” he asked, hesitant to disturb the moment that was upon the land. “What has happened here? Is something new between them and us?”

The old one smiled and shook his head. They paused in their walk, looking down on the edge of the small town, where lights, even in the outbuildings, could still be seen to shine. He leaned on his staff of white as the newcomer attended him. This one seldom spoke, but his words were worth hearing whenever they came.

“Something new? Hardly.” His elder’s eyes—still bright—turned from the town to look at his companion. “Something that has always been, rather, has passed for a while into the realm of men and the line of time.” He smiled, as his gaze returned to the scene below. “It is how they understand things, you see. One moment leads to the next while they live.”

“I understand that, at least, now,” the elder’s apprentice replied. “But why the passing?”

“To show love in the time of men! It will be a blessing to them all, as was the Praising, so that they can hear in its telling and retelling. The Spirit moves in such times, you see, and communes with whom it will.” He straightened, and his staff moved forward as their walk began once more.

“To them all?”

“Yes—all. Every one,” the old one asserted. “Some will not take it up, of course, but that is their choice. Those that love will see in their hearts, even if they do not hear the stories … or know the names.”

The apprentice looked back toward the lights of the town. “And what then will they see?”

The old one paused once more, and bent down to the sandy ground. He pressed his finger into the soil. This time, it yielded, and unlike on any other of their journeys, a few flecks of the dust adhered. The grains came up with him as a display. His companion watched as his fingers flicked them away. The grit dissipated until only a single speck remained. The elder regarded the smallest bit of Judea that he could obtain.

“They will see someone in themselves,” he mused. “Someone less than Who created them, and wonder to their own purpose. Then the Spirit comes, you see, and fear retreats before Him. Love is left behind, and another part of the Whole is set in place, each tended as carefully as any other … each in his own time.” The old one paused, and together they looked back toward the lights of the town. “Or in hers,” he intoned.

A final flick of his fingers returned even the last speck of soil to the ground from whence it had risen, and the lesser of the two perceived his lesson. That ground was made of many of the same. So was the land, as was this Earth … and that remained only a part of the many attentions of Heaven.

“So long an effort, is this whole of parts,” the lesser of the two whispered.

“He is a Craftsman … one who works slowly and well, until His results are achieved. How else would it happen, outside the line of time?”

The young one nodded, his head lowering in respect as they moved on. As they walked, the Judea landscape seemed to absorb them, and after a short time, they too were gone. The moment had passed, and yet remained. As with all His servants, it was eternal.

Choose to Love, -DA

Advent

Bethlehem, Judea
The Census of Quinirius in the years of Augustus

Two men, clad in white, walked a hill overlooking the town. The night, as always outside a camp or the confines of a town, was quiet and cold. Only the moon and stars provided what light broke the darkness. One of those this night shone brightly enough that the shadows, however, held little dominion.

The praise that had taken place was over, and the only witnesses had been the shepherds and their flocks bedded down in these hills. There was time for reflection now, and for walking, and to learn.

One of the two was very old, though his steps were not heavy with age. The other was less so. He had been apprenticed only shortly before the blessed event, and there was still so much that he did not understand. They stepped, but the sandy ground did not show their tracks. They seemed to shine with a light from within, but the luminance cast no shadow. They were here in the land of David, but the lesser of the two felt as if they were also not here. It was not the first such feeling that had come in his new time.

“Friend,” he asked, hesitant to disturb the moment that was upon the land. “What has happened here? Is something new between them and us?”

The old one smiled and shook his head. They paused in their walk, looking down on the edge of the small town, where lights, even in the outbuildings, could still be seen to shine. He leaned on his staff of white as the newcomer attended him. This one seldom spoke, but his words were worth hearing whenever they came.

“Something new? Hardly.” His elder’s eyes—still bright—turned from the town to look at his companion. “Something that has always been, rather, has passed for awhile into the realm of men and the line of time.” He smiled, as his gaze returned to the scene below. “It is how they understand things, you see. One moment leads to the next while they live.”

“I understand that, at least, now,” the elder’s apprentice replied. “But why the passing?”

“To show love in the time of men! It will be a blessing to them all, as was the Praising, so that they can hear in its telling and retelling. The Spirit moves in such times, you see, and communes with whom it will.” He straightened, and his staff moved forward as their walk began once more.

“To them all?”

“Yes—all. Every one,” the old one asserted. “Some will not take it up, of course, but that is their choice. Those that love will see in their hearts, even if they do not hear the stories … or know the names.”

The apprentice looked back toward the lights of the town. “And what then will they see?”

The old one paused once more, and bent down to the sandy ground. He pressed his finger into the soil. This time, it yielded, and unlike on any other of their journeys, a few flecks of the dust adhered. The grains came up with him as a display. His companion watched as his fingers flicked them away. The grit dissipated until only a single speck remained. The elder regarded the smallest bit of Judea that he could obtain.

“They will see someone in themselves,” he mused. “Someone less than Who created them, and wonder to their own purpose. Then the Spirit comes, you see, and fear retreats before Him. Love is left behind, and another part of the Whole is set in place, each tended as carefully as any other … each in his own time.” The old one paused, and together they looked back toward the lights of the town. “Or in hers,” he intoned.

A final flick of his fingers returned even the last speck of soil to the ground from whence it had risen, and the lesser of the two perceived his lesson. That ground was made of many of the same. So was the land, as was this Earth … and that remained only a part of the many attentions of Heaven.

“So long an effort, is this whole of parts,” the lesser of the two whispered.

“He is a Craftsman … one who works slowly and well, until His results are achieved. How else would it happen, outside the line of time?”

The young one nodded, his head lowering in respect as they moved on. As they walked, the Judea landscape seemed to absorb them, and after a short time, they too were gone. The moment had passed, and yet remained. As with all His servants, it was eternal.

Choose to Love, -DA