In the Bleak Midwinter

It’s a new year. 

At 12:53 am, we are driving the dark roads home after celebrating with friends. The last remains of Christmas still swing from most front porches, shining out from living room windows, twinkling on the snow that must have fallen while we drank champagne and kissed our children’s faces. But now the world is dark and quiet as the road curves through old farmland and dusted white pine lanes. Christmas is just an echoing, fading refrain now, washing out into the hills and horizon. Like a familiar hum of "Auld Lang Syne,” we all know how to do this transition from one year to the next, and all of creation steadies on in the normal rhythms. And I? I look eagerly for home. I look for our back porch, twinkle lights hanging loosely, albeit some of them burned out. The one kitchen light on the countertop. The icy puddle splashes as we pull down our drive as tall pine dances slowly in the post-midnight wind. We pull our weary bodies out of the warm car and slowly make our way toward the house. Heavy footsteps through mud, arms full of food we didn’t eat, tired children complaining, footprints in the snow all the way to that warm glow of the back porch, the warm kitchen, the place where we can rest our heads on pillows and under downy blankets.

And something about all of this reminds me of the gospel. Of this new year. Of where I fit in all of it. Because so often this world feels like a dark, ancient landscape. It feels a lot like a winter where Christmas is just an echo and what remains dangles lazily from porches or old street lamps. Forgotten words to an old song that stirs nostalgia in us but we’re not quite sure what for. Where we remember that once there was a song, but now we only know what it maybe used to sound like but can’t quite hum the tune the same way as we used to. A new year on a dark landscape where we stumble in the dark and feign our way toward what we think is enlightenment and progress but really is just another hillside of snow. Here in the dark winter, everyone is fumbling for light. Everyone needs a place to lay their head. Everyone longs to come home. And yet we fill our wandering days with emptiness and are no closer to the place our hearts know we are longing for. Culture rolls on with the same brokenness, the same wheel ruts, the same bare trees, and we are no closer to our goal. There is no new thought, idea, or revelation that illuminates this new year, this land, these old roads that we know so well.

None like the one of Christ, the giver of light, the one who still echoes on.

How much we need that light from the porch calling us home. How much we need the lights of what is good and true telling us “This is where you lay your head.” 

As we step into our house, I looked back once more at the wall of woods that stands guard at the edge of our field. I wondered what would it be like to be a weary traveler stomping through the dark? What would hope look like? Would it look like someone saying that the darkness is where we live? That the mud and the cold and the raw edges of a dying creation are where we rest?

No, most certainly not.

For the weary traveler, the back porch with our lights shining over our coats and mittens, the kitchen countertop lamp, the table set with cookies and chips and the celebration of Christmas still dripping on the edges of all we do – this would be a more welcoming sight. 

So this year, this is all I aim to do in my writing. I do not wish to be enlightened or to have found a way with the words of the world so much that I begin to gain night vision and forget about home. I’m just a weary traveler. I’m longing for the warmth of where we all rest our heads. I’m eager for the celebration to last more than a week, but rather infinite millennia. I’m ready to turn my songs, stories, words, and home into a place where kindling is thrown onto the already burning flame of joy and hope in Christ. That somehow through what I write, as the road turns and the edges of a new year fade into the horizon, I would find my way back to where I rest.

I am no great thinker or philosopher. I am no intellectual who knows the twists and turns of every issue, every topic, every headline. But I do know that I carry the light. So I’ll do my best to light it brighter, bid you come and warm yourself by the fire, and tell you where I found it in the midst of this bleak midwinter.