Are We There Yet?

      My wife and I made our annual December pilgrimage to my hometown of Zanesville, Ohio to make Christmas cookies the week before Christmas. It is a long drive and on the way we kept saying, "Are we there yet?" I finally figured out that the answer was always yes. We were there. It just so happened that the there were we were was not the there where we wanted to be. But we were definitely somewhere, usually somewhere in Pennsylvania which is a really wwwide state when you are trying to get across it.

      We are always there. We are always somewhere. The real question is what we do when we are there. We can keep hoping or wishing that we were somewhere else, all the while we are there.  We can decide this is not where we want to be and spend all of our time and energy trying to get out of there. We can even pretend that we are not there. But there we are just the same.

      The thing is that no matter where our there is, God is there with us. I'm not saying that we should go all Poly Anna or anything. I am saying that even in the midst of the worst that life can throw us, even in the bluest of blue times, even when it seems like everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, even when you are in the middle of the unending Pennsylvania Turnpike with hours to go before you sleep, God is in that there as well.

      Nelson Mandela was in prison for nearly three decades. That is a there where I would not want to be, and even in that degrading, dehumanizing place, he never lost his faith. if he had, he would not have been able to forgive his jailers. If he had, he would not have been able to unite South Africa after the chains of apartheid had finally been broken.

      Wherever our there is, one thing we can be certain of is that we are not alone. The God who loved the world into being, the God who came to show us the face of compassion and mercy, of justice and forgiveness in Jesus, that God is with us always. As we enter a new year and face all of the theres that will come, know that you are not facing them alone. The one who loved us in Jesus, loves us still and calls us to be that loving presence to one another.

      In this new year, may your find yourself always walking with God wherever you may go.