Everyday Magic

While looking through my archives for a certain post, I came across this one, instead, and thought I'd share it, especially since I've, once again, been thinking these same thoughts...

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My life is filled with magic.

Now, I hope you are not one of those stodgy, straight-laced Christians who frowned when you read that sentence because you thought I meant black magic or Harry Houdini magic or pull-a-poor-rabbit-from-a-hat magic. Trust me, I didn't mean any of those.

No, I meant the kind of magic akin to imagination and dreams and delightful surprises on ordinary winter afternoons when snow is falling and logs or candles are burning in your fireplace. (I also meant fairies, but you go mentioning those and some people stare at you oddly.)

I wrote earlier that this year I'll be skipping the blogs which are written by people who feel they are called to suck and vacuum the joy and fun and freedom out of life. The ones which, last month, warned me that there's a dark, ugly side for Christians (and others) to the movies, A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life. Ones which said any parent who plays Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and Easter Bunny with their children is a miserable liar and will pay a price. The ones who pounce upon and chew-up any fellow-Christian who has ever stood for a cause-from-the-heart or made a mistake. Yes, those are the blogs I'm avoiding in 2006.

And this, in part, is why:

Those blogs sound too much like the voices, the people Francis P. Church exposed in his column written to Virginia O'Hanlon (and to the world) in 1897--the people who "tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside." They are those who never, in this life, will see that "there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond."

And when Mr. Church says, even these hundred and nine years later, "The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see," well, I still stand and cheer along with those of you close beside me in crowds so thick, so wide-spread--so joyful--that they overspill the Earth until they touch bright stars and intermingle with the angels on the very edge of Heaven.

I am in that happy crowd of those who sing through the most ordinary days of the world... those lovers of the mysteries of rattles... the ones who see as the real heroes those who get up out of their chairs and Try, whether they succeed or not. Because Doers are the brave ones, the ones who deserve to speak, unlike Sitters who scowl and feel free to rip apart those who failed, never even thinking that at least they Tried. At least they got out of the safe Life's Observer Boats and tried to walk on water and do a new thing.

If you are a fun-sucking, Life-sucking, Light-dimming, grouchy old blog-writing Christian, I wish you a new morning when you open your eyes as though for the very first time. And I wish you the joy which comes from seeing your days in a new Light which reveals a kind of Living--a kind of magic--seen no other way.

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Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." John 20:29

To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. Titus 1:15