Finding Ourselves in The Arc of the Story
January 2, 2025 | by: Bill Burns | 0 Comments
Posted in: Guest Writers
“…I stood on the island’s ocean shore and saw what there was to see: a pile of colorless stripes. Through binoculars I could see a bigger pile of colorless stripes.
It seemed reasonable to call the colorless stripe overhead ‘sky,’ and reasonable to call the colorless stripe at my feet ‘ice,’ for I could see where it began. I could distinguish, that is, my shoes, and the black gravel shore, and the nearby frozen ice the wind had smashed ashore. It was this mess of ice—ice breccia, pressure ridges, and standing floes, ice sheets upright, tilted, frozen together and jammed—which extended out to the horizon. No matter how hard I blinked, I could not put a name to any of the other stripes. Which was the horizon? Was I seeing land, or water, or their reflections in low clouds? Was I seeing the famous ‘water sky,’ the ‘frost smoke,’ or the ‘ice blink’?”
It’s probably just the recent cold snap that’s bringing this to mind as I composed this. But this passage from Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole” has stuck with me ever since first reading it some fifteen or twenty years ago. The description of her disorientation on her trip to the Pole above the Arctic Circle is evocative of our own feelings of not being entirely sure where we stand sometimes. In her account, it was physical disorientation brought about by her surroundings at the time. But this sense of disorientation can occur to us in other ways.
Christmastime is, of course, the celebration of the advent of Christ into the world. It would be easy to mistake this event, that is, Christ’s coming into the world, as a beginning to the story. But to think of Advent in this way is to miss, or forget, that Christ’s incarnation was more of a midpoint in the arc of the biblical story. It’s easy to make a similar sort of mistake when we think about the Resurrection, which we look forward to celebrating in just a few months now, namely, that it is the end of the story of redemption. Far from it.
The turning of another year is an opportunity for us all to take stock of where we find ourselves in the story of Jesus. After all, if you have put your faith in Him, we have a commission: to proclaim the gospel of His coming and His sacrifice for us, wherever we go, and to teach one another to observe all that He has commanded us. That may seem like a monumental task, and it is. But we often forget His promise, attached to this great commission: “Lo, I am with you always.”
So, as the new year is upon us, let’s take opportunities to walk in this great work together, keeping in mind, that Christ, Immanuel, is still with us, through the power of His Spirit working in us. If we feel a sense of disorientation, we do well to look to Jesus. He will guide us, and, as CS Lewis said, He will bring us, “further up, and further in.”
It may seem mundane from our perspectives, but we can get our bearings by getting involved in a life group, joining an Adult Sunday School class, or getting involved with Children’s ministries, serving on the Care Team, looking for opportunities to share your faith with your friends, neighbors, co-workers, or serving with Pastor Dale at Hocker Grove Elementary. Commit yourself to joining us in prayer for Oak Hills and her work in the monthly prayer gatherings. Or perhaps you need simply to rest, and worship. We all need to do that from time to time. Wherever you find yourself as we move into the new year, let’s lift up Christ together at Oak Hills in 2025. He promised; He will draw His people to Himself. Amen to that, and Happy New Year!
-Bill Burns
