Twilight at Christmas


 There is a place between sleeping and waking that doesn't have a name. That place between dreamland and awareness when sleep's veil dawns to life. Why doesn't this place have a name? This is the most important time of the day. It is the moment you realize your nighttime prayer---if I should die before I
wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take---wasn't needed this night. Morning came and you are still alive.  

In this no-name place between sleep and awake, you sometimes get thoughts, insights, revelations, answers to tricky problems. Something dark undims as twilight dawns to light. It happens to me quite often. It happened to me this morning of Christmas 2022. I understood something about death. Death is like twilight. An unveiling happens between your final breath and your first naked sight of Jesus. Like birth. You emerged from the dark womb into a world unimaginable, a place you could only sense from the sounds you could hear prior to birth. 

Bethlehem. 

The place where Jesus was human born. 

The Cross. 

That twilight place where God's final physical breath broke eternity's water from top to bottom. That place where Jesus was unveiled Jesus as Master of the Universe, Savior of the World, Lover of Humanity. Giver of real life. 

God's speaks, I believe, in the twilight between our final breath and our first naked sight of Jesus. "Follow me. Take my life as your own." 

Jesus loves you like a mother waiting for her baby to be born. When you take your final breath and your eyes see him, and you hear his invitation to follow, what will you say? Will you take his life as your own? Will you choose light? Or reject him and die in the dark? 

Surely you will say yes on that wonderful morning of death! 

So why wait until you die to say yes? Say yes today. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. Today you can be born again into a living hope! Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to God's great mercy, God has caused us to be born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Peter 1:3). 

Dear ones, don't wait for death's twilight to say yes. Do it today. And have a VERY Merry Christmas for the rest of your life into forever! 

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