Ever wonder about this word “prayer” that people toss around so recklessly?

Sometimes it’s a cue to take a quick nap in the middle of a church service, or sometimes it’s like a hot potato at the dinner table – someone else do it! Sometimes it is long and eloquent and frilly and not really meant seriously, like prayer invocations at graduations and weddings and presidential inaugurations. Sometimes it is kooky, and makes you wonder about people who claim that God tells them strange things.

Maybe you have wanted to pray but don’t know how, and you aren’t sure who to ask about it or how to ask them without sounding odd. Plus, maybe you’re worried that you’ll have to become religious in order to pray.
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And so here we are again, at the end of a long year, symbolic of so many journeys in our lives. And here we are again, celebrating the advent of the much-promised Life. And here we are again, refreshed by the birth of God’s own Life in our midst, hopeful yet that revolution is still possible, even if we know the story of how this celebrated Life is one day going to be meekly, humbly, perhaps vainly, even mysteriously sacrificed.

For we know, even if we sometimes don’t dare believe it, that the sacrifice is only the beginning of the Story of how God chose to give us Life. And what a Life! Not just any merely humanly bountiful life, but His own special Life, a life marked by eternity.

So, this Christmas, may that recklessly given Life drench your thirsty soul and may that Life become born again in you. And this coming New Year, may that Life become yours, in all the fullness and depth and joy and abundance that comes with it – the abundant trials and rejoicings, the deeply worked change toward selfless love and away from self-seeking sin, the full (even overfull) challenges and perplexing faith journeys and the peace of living with mysteries, the humility of learning how to truly live with one another, the joys of serving and loving, and, above all, the prize beyond comprehension: the growing closeness with our living King and Lord Jesus as you serve Him and His Kingdom around you.

May you walk this coming year in the reckless grace and peace of His Journey.

So I found myself loathing my neighbors upstairs a few nights ago.

Alexis and I moved house a few months ago to the other side of “downtown Belchertown”. We moved from being in a nice duplex to a semi-apartment-complex. We are in a first floor apartment in a square house with four apartments, two on the first floor and two on the second floor. There are three such houses in a row here, making for a total of 12 apartments.

It’s a different environment than the one we got used to over the past year - last year we had a large two-floor apartment that was one-half of a quiet duplex on a quiet cul-de-sac. Our neighbors were a great young family - a UMass professor, his wife, and their two adorable kids aged 3 and 1.5.

We loved our neighbors - it was quite easy actually - and we met with them regularly. They became good friends whom we still meet with weekly.

We miss them

Now, don’t get me wrong - we are trying to get to know our neighbors at our new place too… but…

Well, I’m learning just how much distance there is between all my big words about living recklessly in community and actually, you know, like, living in community.
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… is to live.

I am becoming weary of so many books and contradictory “truths” out there, it seems that wherever I turn there is another Christian or spiritualist out with a new book/church/sermon/TV story on how to live.

When I turn to God’s wisdom, the quiet sense I get is this : the key to life is living.

That is, really living, not just breathing in and out. Living with a passion, a dream, a verve, a desire ardent, a heart that beats in rhythm with God’s chaotic Spirit.
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“Are you allowed to touch that?”, asked the man behind me at the Dunkin Donuts line, addressing the little boy who was tapping his outstretched fingers on the plastic front of the “Please enter here” sign.

The boy looked at him, and then back at the sign, and reached out to touch the sign again.
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