So I think Christmas posts have replaced Christmas letters, so here's mine.  This is the end of a year of change for my family.  It started with a word from my wife, that God can turn it around in a minute, just like that.  Then a pastor friend told me that some one had given a word at his church that this was the year it would get better.  I received it like it had been given to me personally.  But if in January you told me where I'd find myself in December, I'd have called you crazy.  Like the old song says, "We're content / to pitch our tent / when the glory's evident / seldom do we know the glory came and went"

So this year I spent Christmas in Belvidere Illinois with people I didn't even know a year ago.  And yet in so short a time they have taken residence in my heart and I feel like I've always known them.  There are people here I was always supposed to meet, and it took me 43 years in my journey to find them.

And I miss the ones that said goodbye this year.  People who I watch on the computer as they grow and move into new places and new things without me there to encourage and sometimes tease.  I feel the loss for not being in the day to day journey they are on, and miss them walking with me.  I miss our morning coffee's together, our lunch meetings, our office chats, our walking around the barn, all those places that now I can only visit now and remember how they shaped my life, how they were the bread that sustained me on my journey for so many years.

We grow older and old places grow strange to us, like a feeling we can't quite place.  But I am so thankful for the "now" places.  When I first walked around the church we are pastoring, I asked the Lord, in the only moment I remember being alone, "Will this path be familiar to me?" and he said "Yes".  I knew in my knower that I had found a new home.  And so here, at the turning of the year, I am thankful more than anything else, for the one person I know will walk all these paths with me, my savior, my Lord.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and He will make your paths straight."  Walk straight my friends.