Many of us, when charting the timeline of our lives, can point to a moment when a story or poem happened. It happened the way an accident or a record-breaking snowfall happened: It was sometimes expected, sometimes not. One moment we were performing the usual routine—pouring cereal, say, or opening the mail—and the next moment we sat motionless with a book in our hands, eyes unfocused, the wave of words washing over us as relentlessly as a newsreel.
When we look back and narrate our life, we will remember precisely where we were sitting, what we were wearing, the way the eaves dripped in the fog. Ever after, when we hear dripping eaves, we will remember. The story, the poem, will come back to us like the voice of long-dead grandfather, sharply, as if there has been no time or distance in between. It doesn’t matter who wrote it, or why. What matters is that it changed us.
This Christmas season, when we’re tempted to get wrapped up in the blitz of online words, Advent offers us the chance to step back and take the long view. Our God is an author of epics. Perhaps this is why Jesus is known as the very Word of God (see John 1:1–5)—the story itself that leaps out of the pages of Scripture and walks among us. We read this story, this person, this Savior, like the best of all books, and we are forever changed.
Sarah Arthur is an editor of literary guides to prayer from Paraclete Press, including Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, from which these devotions are adapted (©2014 by Sarah Arthur, used by permission). Her forthcoming book, with coauthor Erin Wasinger, is The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us (Brazos Press).
