As this year spins to a halt, I am remembering again this week just how thankful I am for so many people. For my wife, my siblings, my family, and my friends. Too many people to name in a blog, too many people to thank on a single day, even if I was kicking up my feet by a fireplace and writing out a list, instead of spending my day playing music. 

What do you do with thankfulness? You create. You can’t help but spill over your treasures to those around you, to celebrate the goodness of what you’ve been given. As a christian, this day helps me to remember and celebrate what I’ve been so fortunate to receive. It’s been what has driven everything that’s worthwhile and good in my life: Christ’s birth in a manger, and his later crucifixion on the cross for my sins. 

It’s God’s creativity and unexpectedness of redeeming me using this strange set of circumstances that makes me sure that God values irony, contradictions, and the uneasy tensions of merging a perfect God to the body of a human infant. It never fails to baffle me at this time of the year, and each year the mystery deepens. 

The basis of great art is tension, and it’s my relationship with Christ, messy and as wild as it is, is what drives my creativity. I do not bring my creativity to my relationship with Christ- it flows like a river from Him, and some trickles out of me occasionally. And for that I’m deeply thankful.

Merry Christmas, dear readers.