Immanuel

The evenings are getting so dark.


Some people like fall, and even, inexplicably, winter.


Those people are weird.


Yes, there is beauty in the change of seasons, especially in the splendor of foliage.  The beginning of the school year always feels like a fresh start.  Cozy blankets, hot drinks, and pumpkin pie candles are all nice.


But the darkness.  Who doesn't feel melancholy to notice that each day is shorter than the last, that the sun shows itself less and less, that the world is getting ready for a long, lifeless sleep?


Each year tells the same story.  The garden dies, the world gets cold and dark, and life seems to ebb away.  People like me get gloomy.  We're incapable of holding onto summer or keeping the sun shining.


But...  "While we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5:6).  


The Lord God did not just walk with His people in the verdant garden.  He didn't show up when life was a sunny beach, to join the party.


We celebrate Christmas at the darkest time of year.  This is right and good, because Jesus came to a dark, dark world.  When we were steeped in sin and blindness, when the ground of the garden was cursed and dead, Jesus showed up.  Not shying away from our miseries, He joined us in them, and redeemed us from them.

"The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light,

And those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death,

Upon them a Light dawned."

-Matthew 4:16

This, then, is also part of the story--the beginning of the glorious final chapters.  

We have hardly anything to do with it.  We didn't summon a Savior any more than we summon the spring.  Oh yes, we cry out for a Savior--indeed, just as Jill did in C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair:

"Please, what task, Sir?" said Jill.

"The task for which I called you and him here out of your own world."

This puzzled Jill very much.  "It's mistaking me for someone else," she thought.  She didn't dare to tell the Lion this, though she felt things would get into a dreadful muddle unless she did.

"Speak your thought, Human Child," said the Lion.

"I was wondering--I mean--could there be some mistake?  Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know.  It was we who asked to come here.  Scrubb said we were to call to--to Somebody--it was a name I wouldn't know--and perhaps the Somebody would let us in.  And we did, and then we found the door open."

"You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.

"Then you are Somebody, Sir?" said Jill.

"I am."

May every premature sunset this season, every biting wind, remind us of the Savior who loved us enough to break into our darkness and be with us there.