Since I got my turntable a couple of years ago, one of my new favorite Christmas traditions is playing Christmas vinyl. It’s one of the few things that can immediately connect me back to those childhood days on Fox Meadows Road in Memphis where Christmas music came to life by laying the needle down on the record groove.

My collection is a mix of old and new. I mean that I have the new remastered records that come in a variety of colors and patterns and the old records with the dusty jackets that basically only come in black, like the original Ford Model T cars.

I do think that music is one of the most powerful memory triggers there is. I can hear a random song at any point in my day and immediately remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard it. When I put on an old Christmas record, I can just about see the old den in my mind with the record player in the corner behind one of the La-z-boys we had back then.

I still have my immense collection of Christmas CDs and I will occasionally play a Classic Christmas station on Pandora, but best way to tangibly relive old memories is through vinyl, especially when it’s the old standards like Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby or Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra.

I hope you have traditions that will both reach out to the next generations and tie you back to your history all while reminding you of how blessed you are.

I believe that qualifies as a first world problem, but the struggle is real. When you get all comfy and get your blankets arranged just right, then you have to get up to search for the remote that you could have sworn was right next to you? That’s the worst.

Or maybe when you’re snuggled in bed and have finally found that perfect sleeping position with the covers and blankets perfectly situated, then you realize that you have to pee. Unfortunately, your bladder couldn’t have told you that bit of information five minutes earlier.

I’m beginning to understand that the older you get the more you will fall asleep when you don’t want to and then at night when you actually want to, you can’t. And not being able to sleep when you’re tired is annoying as anything.

Probably on everyone’s list is biting into a chocolate chip cookie only to find that it’s oatmeal raisin. I do like oatmeal raisin cookies, especially when they’re fresh from the oven, but not when my taste buds are expecting chocolate.

If you can think of more of these first world problems, feel free to share. Maybe one day I’ll revisit this topic and do a sequel.

I heard once that the best way to get rich quick is to count your blessings because that’s where your true wealth lies. I will say that if someone wants to test me by giving me a million dollars to see if I will still remain the same humble person, I am up for the challenge.

With that in mind, I do have some blessings that I’m grateful for:

1. For the family sitting around the dining room table and sharing a Thanksgiving meal.
2. For my church that isn’t made of brick and mortar but of people who are invested in each other and the gospel (and who are getting closer to moving into our first permanent location).
3. For the upcoming Advent and Christmas season that reminds me why I have hope.
4. For tacos.
5. For being able to serve at Room in the Inn for going on 13 years and seeing how we’re able to bless so many homeless men and be blessed in the process.
6. For my almost 9 year old Mac laptop that still works.
7. For my tortie feline who is always a comforting presence and still loves her belly rubs.
8. For my old Jeep that still gets me where I need to go.
9. For Audible that helps me bear the joys of a daily commute in Nashville traffic.
10. For the faithfulness of God in every season.
11. For the ministry formerly known as Kairos as it begins a new season and a new chapter.
12. For whoever thought to put chocolate and peanut butter together.
13. For every morning that I get to wake up and experience God’s fresh new mercies.

The list really could go on much longer, but I do have my 5 am wake-up call and my fun early morning commute. I do believe that if I count my blessings, I can say truthfully that I am very rich.

If you haven’t already read this amazing book by C. S. Lewis (which you should), there are possible spoilers ahead. You have been warned:

“‘But how could it be true, sir?’ said Peter.

‘Why do you say that?’ asked the Professor.

‘Well, for one thing,’ said Peter, ‘if it was real why doesn’t everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.’

“What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.

‘Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.’

‘Are they?’ said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

‘But there was no time,’ said Susan. ‘Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours.’

‘That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true,’ said the Professor. ‘If there really is a door in this house that leads to some other world (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it)—if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time. On the other hand, I don’t think many girls of her age would invent that idea for themselves. If she had been pretending, she would have hidden for a reasonable time before coming out and telling her story.’

‘But do you really mean, sir,’ said Peter, ‘that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just round the corner—like that?’

‘Nothing is more probable,’ said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, ‘I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.’

‘But what are we to do?’ said Susan. She felt that the conversation was beginning to get off the point.

‘My dear young lady,’ said the Professor, suddenly looking up with a very sharp expression at both of them, ‘there is one plan which no one has yet suggested and which is well worth trying.’

‘What’s that?’ said Susan.

‘We might all try minding our own business,’ said he. And that was the end of that conversation.”

One day I will find a way into Narnia. I just know it.

“What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not come yet. Only the hope for it has come, only the longing for it. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver. Soon. But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are” (Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark).

Apparently, we’re having a shorter than usual Advent season. It starts next Sunday and lasts only 22 days this year. But for a lot of us, we’ve been waiting a lot longer than 22 days for God to show up strong in the world and make everything right. Some days, it feels like 2,000 years plus 22 days.

But just as the hush in the theater means the curtain is about to rise and just as the hazy ring around the moon means snow will soon be falling, so we know that Advent will come and God will keep His promises and be as faithful as ever.

I loved this the first time I saw it, and I still love it. I wish I knew who originated it. I’d love to give proper credit. But I can at least keep sharing it for those who need to hear it or read it.

“He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s diminution’? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain).

God doesn’t need our worship and adoration. In fact, God doesn’t need us. God has no need at all because God is in Himself completely self-sufficient and whole.

It’s we who need to worship God to remind us that we in fact are not God. God is outside of us and is completely other, not just a better, faster, stronger version of us. As I read earlier, God and His ways are beyond our complete understanding or otherwise we wouldn’t need trust. We wouldn’t need faith.

We worship God because there’s no way we could have ever known God on our own. We would never have even sought God on our own if God hadn’t first sought us. We worship God because He has made Himself known to us in a way that we could understand and in a way that didn’t destroy us.

Remember that if we in our present state saw God in all His glory as He is, we would die. It would be too much for our senses and all our capacity. The finite could never hope to grasp the infinite.

But God made Himself Jesus so we could understand God.

And so we worship.

“Jesus learned obedience by the things which He suffered, not by the things which He enjoyed. In order to fit you for His purposes both here and in eternity, He has lent you this sorrow. But He bears the heavier end of the Cross laid upon you! [See Hebrews 5:8]” (Elisabeth Elliott).

I find something about older books that I don’t find in the newer ones. It seems to me that there was much more of a prophetic bold voice in the writers of faith from back in the day that’s not nearly as present in this age. Maybe it’s because talk about suffering doesn’t sell books or build brands anymore.

I personally would much rather learn obedience by doing what I enjoy. If there was a way to godliness through napping, I’d take it. But unfortunately, that’s not the way of Jesus.

Throughout the prophecies and gospels, we find a Man of Suffering acquainted with grief. We see that His whole life was leading to death on a cross at Golgotha. We learn about a ministry where people by and large rejected this Messiah because He talked about things like eating His flesh and drinking His blood and taking up your cross to be His disciple.

I don’t think Jesus would ever want us to deliberately seek out way to suffer and be unhappy. But I do think that more and more as we seek to follow Jesus, we will have trouble. We will suffer. We will be ridiculed and misunderstood and rejected and hated. Some of us will suffer physically. Some of us may well lose our lives.

But we will not undergo anything that Jesus hasn’t already endured first. We will never be asked to carry any cross that Jesus hasn’t carried first, to walk any road He hasn’t already gone before and made a way. We have the promise that He will be with us to the end of this age where everything’s upside down and people celebrate evil and condemn good.

May we endure to the end not because we are perfectly faithful to Jesus but because He is perfectly faithful to us. Amen.

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind” (C. S. Lewis). 

On this date 60 years ago, we lost John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World). While most of the world only remembers the first Jack (as in Kennedy), many like me point to the second Jack (as Lewis preferred to be called) as greatly influential in their growing in both faith and imagination. Narnia lives on.

I don’t recall seeing anything about JFK on social media or the news (what little I watched of it). It’s mind-blowing to think that it’s been six decades since he was assassinated, regardless of what your thoughts are on who actually pulled the trigger. And yes, I saw the Oliver Stone movie in a theater long, long ago.

I get JFK is an icon. I get that November 22, 1963 remains a watershed moment in American history, a day of tragedy that led to better days where civil rights laws were passed.

For me, C. S. Lewis was much more influential. It started with the Narnia books and progressed from there. No one could take a complicated theological or apologetical concept and explain it in layman’s terms quite like he did. After all, intelligence isn’t spouting a lot of big words but taking something complex and making it sound simple.

His death was overshadowed by the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, as was the death of philosopher Aldous Huxley, who also died on the same day. On this day, we remember them all.