It’s Finals Week at The Master’s College.  This means that my first semester as the Dean of Men is almost finished.  I don’t know that there’s an easy way to document the experience.  My thoughts have tended to swirl the past few months and I’ll be taking Christmas Break to try to sort them out.  On December 20, Judah turns three and our marriage turns six.  The blessing of each is exponentially greater than its age.

It has been a full and weighty season.  Only time will unfold the lessons learned and the trajectories set.  I often found myself wrestling with thoughts and decisions that I didn’t think I would wrestle with again for awhile.  And even more often, I found myself wondering where some important things had gone that I never thought would leave.

It is easy to assume that growth will always follow time, age, and experience.  But this does not always happen.  Growth may seem natural in some arenas, but it is never mere happenstance.  And it is folly — at times precipitous folly — to assume so.  It is good that God knows the frailty of our frame and remembers that we are merely dust (Psalm 103:14), because we do not seem to except when we begin to be blown about.

In the midst of all of this, I am filled with hope as I see Christmas approaching again.  In the past several years I have begun to see the incarnation as not mainly a birth but a dawning, not simply a majestic event but an unspeakable in-breaking.  We celebrate not just a birthday but a fulfillment, a revelation, and the beginnings of a re-creation.  Oh, for the day when it will be complete.