You know that moment when you hear or read something and it speaks to you? Like, it really speaks to you in a real un-corny, un-cliche, totally natural way? It moves you? I know that moment. I had one of those moments on the way home from shopping tonight. The song was Cat Steven’s Peace Train.

I haven’t been into Christmas this year. There are so many things to be worried about, to stress over and to have my heart broken by. There is darkness, pain, uncertainty and evil in our world. There is shallowness and pettiness. There is despair. Confusion and separation. From Middle Eastern conflict to the death of beautiful, innocent children, there is so much darkness in our world, in our country, in our hearts.

But on the edge of this darkness, there comes the peace train. Or, in truth, the Prince of Peace. Something good has begun, it began with the birth of Christ in little Bethlehem. Or really, it began with a promise in the garden, when darkness first entered the world. It was a promise made to man and a promise that took great orchestrating to bring to fruition. Just check out the lineage on the first page of Matthew. It’s a long line of sinners, screw up, sluts, and down right stupid heads. But God made it happen anyway. He worked through those sinners and got them to the right stable, in the right little town, right on time. Beautiful.

If our God has authority over the front page of the New Testament, surely we can trust His authority over the front page of the newspaper. We can trust that every need we have will be provided for. We can trust that if we need that tuition money He’ll give it to us. When we need that comfort and peace in times of sadness, and we will because we live in a horribly fallen world, we can trust that He will be a ever present comfort in times of trouble.

Now that is something to be truly excited about. To be comforted by. “Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again”. He will. He will take this country and the whole world as one. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess.

And He will take us home again. I am going home to be with Him. JOY TO THE WORLD.

“He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be chanelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But, in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely-from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on, so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.”