It always happens. No matter how many times I go away on vacation and no matter how many times I think I’m prepared to accept once more the return to the reality of every day life, there’s always a bit of a letdown. Tomorrow, the real world resumes. And I’m just not ready for it.

I don’t necessarily want to stay in vacation mode forever. Even a great vacation at an ideal destination can get old after a while. There’s only so much you can see and do, plus I would end up gaining about 100 pounds from all the vacation eating.

But the idea of getting up at 5 am to trek 21 miles to a job isn’t my idea of a welcome back.

Still, I think it’s all about perception.

I know of someone who was bedridden from a stroke who would have given just about anything to get to go to work. He said that if he could have gone back to having a job again, he’d never complain about it ever again. Ouch.

Being an adult is sometimes doing the stuff you don’t want to so that you can enjoy the fun stuff later. It’s about appreciating stuff more once you’ve had the satisfaction of having worked for it and earned it.

Then there’s grace. That’s the stuff you get that you don’t deserve. I truly believe that me waking up this morning in good health and having a job that allows me to take vacations is ultimately grace. That’s the goodness of God that I can never earn or get but only receive and be thankful for it.

So yes, I’m grateful for my job. I’m grateful for my life. I’m grateful for mercies that are new every morning — even on Mondays.

Jesus said that He didn’t come for the healthy and the righteous, but for the sinners and the sick. In today’s terms, the church isn’t supposed to be a kind of exclusive country club for the holier than thou set, but a hospital for broken sinners, including the ones whom Jesus has redeemed.

If any church loses its purpose of sharing the whole gospel with the whole person, it should probably close its doors for good. If any body of believers fails to seek out the same ones Jesus came to seek and to save, it should cease to exist.

Jesus also said that churches that have lost their first love need to repent and return to their biblical roots before they lose their anointing. Churches that have made politics, whether left or right, conservative or liberal, their main focus need to get on their knees and repent.

My prayer is that the American church can become like the early church found in the book of Acts. Anything less is not worthy of being called the body of Christ.

No matter where I go, I know I can depend on coffee being there at some point. I know I get to have that magic potion made with beans and hot water that perks (pun intended) me right up and gets me going.

I don’t pretend to be a purist when it comes to coffee. I usually add my fair share of creamer and/or sugar. The day you see me drinking my coffee black, you know that a) I’ve been taken over by one of those alien pods, b) it’s my evil twin, or c) I fell down and hit my head and no longer know who or where I am.

But yes, I love my coffee. Or as you purists might call it, my coffee-flavored sugar milk, it’s fantastic.

So far, my vacation has gone well. I used the first three days as a sort of stay-cation and piddled around the town. Today I went with my family to Gatlinburg, a place I’ve been countless times before but always takes me to my happy place.

We stopped by Rugby, a tiny little town in East Tennessee with a unique history, which I recommend you check out if you’re not already familiar with it. Then we ate at Huck Finn’s, another favorite of mine, for dinner. Last, we ended up at the Glenstone Lodge, where I stayed as a kid back in the 80s. Yes, the 1980s, not the 1880s.

There’s something comforting about going back to a familiar place. While I’m a fan of branching out and trying new things, I occasionally like to go back and revisit places that hold good memories for me. it’s almost like traveling back to a simpler time. At the same time, it’s a reminder to me that I’m not the same person who originally made those memories so long ago. I can see how much I’ve grown.

So far, so good.

“Jesus didn’t wait until Joseph and Mary were comfortably settled in the suburbs to come into the world. He came to them when they were staying in a barn. He’s not waiting for me to get my act together; He has met me in my poverty of spirit in this moment.”

We’re right on the cusp of the holiday season. Thanksgiving is two weeks away from tomorrow, then follows my personal favorites, the season of Advent and Christmas. The season of God becoming incarnate in the form of an infant, becoming like us so that we could one day become like Him.

I love the idea that Jesus didn’t wait until the world was ready. He didn’t wait until Joseph and Mary had their act together and had established a middle class existence in some fashionable neighborhood. He came to a couple of peasants in the middle of the night in a place where cattle ate out of a feeding trough. He came with no fanfare or applause or worldwide announcements. The first to hear of His arrival were some smelly shepherds tending their flocks in the middle of nowhere.

In the same way, Jesus comes to you and me not when we’ve finally got it all together and are living our best lives, but in the moments where we are the least deserving and most in need of a Savior. He came to those who were — and are — poor in spirit. That is, to those who are aware that they in and of themselves have nothing to offer to God but a deep need and a desperate hunger for Something More in their heart of hearts.

Even now, we can begin to prepare our hearts for Advent. Even now, we can reorient our focus away from the consumeristic to the contemplative, from the giving and receiving of presents to the adoration of the infant King in the manger. Even now, we can enter into His courts with thanksgiving.

“Speak up for the people who have no voice,
    for the rights of all the misfits.
Speak out for justice!
    Stand up for the poor and destitute!” (Proverbs 31:8-9, The Message)

May we remember that God chose the weak to shame the strong, the outcasts to shame the in-crowd, and the nobodies to shame the who’s who. And in case you and I have forgotten, we were the weak and the outcasts and the nobodies before we met God. Now we’re a royal priesthood, sons and daughters of the living God, and living stones built into a temple of the Almighty.

God has appointed us to speak for those who have no voice just as Jesus was our advocate when we had no one else to speak for us. We intercede for the outcast as Jesus intercedes for us before the Father in heaven. Jesus came to seek and save the lost, and now we who were lost are to continue to seek out those who fall through the cracks and who no one else sees but who are precious to the God who made them.

‘An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bed- room where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life—what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

I’ve noticed that most of the prayers that God hears are really the ones that God prompted me to pray. Even more, I sense that when I can’t find the right words — or even words at all — I can rely on the Holy Spirit to interpret what I want to say, what I long to say, what I’m unable to say and put it in words that God can answer.

So basically I’m praying to God the Father from God the Holy Spirit within based on the finished work of God the Son, who lives and pleads for me before God the Father. That concept makes my brain hurt, but at the same time, I’m eternally grateful that it works.

“We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. How can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?…We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God’s problem? … But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: ‘Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.’… Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference… How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? ‘Oh, never mind…boys will be boys’. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian ‘killing fields’ or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice” (Rebecca Pippert).

I do believe that God is love. I also believe that God gets angry. God gets angry whenever people mistreat and abuse anyone who is made in His image. God gets angry when people try to say that what He says is evil is really good and what He says is good is really evil. God gets angry when sin destroys people’s lives.

God got good and angry at the cross, then He proceeded to pour out all that wrath on Jesus. So yes, God is love. But the Bible puts holiness as the main characteristic of God, which means that God’s love is a holy love, not content to put up with anything less than His best for the beloved.

I believe that Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. That’s true. I also believe that when they had been around Jesus long enough, they were no longer prostitutes or tax collectors or sinners. That was not their identity anymore. The holy love of Jesus didn’t merely tolerate their behavior but transformed them into their best selves — into what God had in mind when He created them.

And yes, Jesus got angry. He got angry when He saw the temple misused and the people in the temple putting up barriers to keep others from getting to God. He got angry when Pharisees saw keeping their rules as more important than the man with a withered hand who needed Jesus to heal Him, regardless of what day of the week it was. He grieved over a city that had rejected Him and didn’t recognize their Messiah when He was staring them in the face.

But it was a holy anger just as much as it was a holy love. On the cross, Jesus forgave those who were in the very act of murdering Him, not because what they were doing was okay or that it didn’t matter, but because God turned that act of hate into the means of salvation for anyone who would believe.

In case you haven’t already done so, it’s time to fall back. You get to set your clocks back one hour for that extra hour of being unable to sleep. Unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii, where you can have your insomnia without all the pain of daylight savings.

I’d recommend that you get started. You officially have until 2 am on Sunday morning, but who wants to be padding around and fiddling with clocks at that hour? I think I’d rather be sleeping.

Also, if anyone can figure out how to get rid of daylight savings, that would be great.