A Year In Review

It’s time to put together our annual Christmas letter. What's happened in 2009? To refresh my memory, I look through my calendar and read a year's worth of blog entries. As I look back, it seems to me that that this blog is like a photo album... capturing individual moments in time... not a documentary telling the story of our year. What's been left out?
In many ways, Marsh and I are a bit tired right now. Both of us have been doing alot of traveling for work (and therefore we've done too little traveling together!). And Marsh's folks have had a tough year with health and accidents (mine, thankfully, are doing very well). While both of us feel we are “right where God want us” we’re wishing things were a bit easier...

Even as I write that, I chuckle to myself. I know that walking with God isn’t about things being easier, but better. After all, if ease was crucial, then Jesus-God-in-the-flesh would have sat up in heaven, and not ventured to come down to this world. But come He did, in a not-easy way... born to a young girl, brought into this life in the dust and dung of a barn, hunted by the powers-that-be when He was just a toddler. Living a life where He experienced joy and sorrow, gladness and pain, love and grief. Was His life easy? Not a chance. Especially with the the death He faced! But was it good? Oh, yes, it was good. Not only “good” in the sense of living a moral life, but good in the sense that He did something with His life that no one else could do... He spiritually rescues us so that we can now be in right and full relationship with the God of the universe. I guess I’m glad that God never chose the “easy” over the good.