O Holy Night

Sometimes songs come and linger with me, favorites of the Spirit, so to say. One which has visited this week is "O Holy Night," which is a song celebrating the 1st coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Usually Christians sing this carol around Christmas and it is part of the mixture stirred with shopping malls and home decor and apple cider and candy canes and pine trees and warm clothing. So, it is a bit out of context to be singing this song in the spring/summer: which provoked me to inquiry in the house of the Lord.

If you look at the lyrics this summer, absent all of secular (and religious) holiday distractions, it is a beautiful song, and captures the contradiction inherent in the epiphany. Even the song's title is antithetical: holy ...night?

God always chooses to create a dawn, while the world is in darkness. I wonder what kind of dawn is about to break in my life? (or my city) - if indeed the coming of this song is prophetic - which I believe it is. The God of faith requires that we trust in Him and the intimacy we have with Him, in spite of circumstances and in the midst of them.

Numbers Racket

In this month's Harper's Magazine, Kevin P. Phillips penned an article Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know indicting the United States government for intentional falsification of vital economic indicators for a few decades.

In fact, he speculates a probable causal link between the credit crisis we're now in with this habit of lying. The problem with lying is that you can't stop: one leads to another and another and another, and the longer it goes on, the more severe the consequences once you're caught or reality catches up.

God save America.