Silent night, holy night.

If you're a Bread of Life attender, you may have heard me pray for Tristan during prayers of the people. He was diagnosed three years ago with an especially nasty brain tumor. Christmas came early for Tristan this year. He died Wednesday morning.
I got the word later that morning as I was reading over the lectionary for Sunday's sermon. Here's a snippet from Isaiah 65:

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

Weeks before entering hospice, Tristan had been wrestling dark, dark dreams. Maybe they were just the percolations of understandable anxiety. Maybe they were his conflicted relationship with God taking shape. You could say Tristan and God had been having an extra special long-lasting lovers' quarrel. He had his share of anger towards God: an adolescent's anger over a dad killed by a drunk driver; an adult man's anger over missing out on the wife and kids he quietly but desperately wanted. No doubt there was more. Taken together, the reasons formed a wedge that leveraged Tristan away from the light and into a darker place. At night, when that place became tangible, he preferred not to sleep, ducking the dreams.
But a few days before he died, there was a change. He slept and smiled, sometimes even chuckled. When he woke up, he talked about the bright light in his dreams. Once, very near the end during a brief stint of consciousness, he asked his stalwart friend Bill, "do you see that light in here? how bright it is? He let Bill know that the quarrel was over, the darkness gone, peace had come.
The reach of God's arm astounds me. Over and through lifetimes of stubbornness, hurt and pushing Him away, God comes. Christmas looks back to Christ's manger, and forward to his throne, our here once and coming again king. Whether we see Him on that throne from this life or the next, its still a fact. And he'll be bringing all kinds of newness with him, just like Isaiah describes. No more tears, no more distress, no more too-short lived lives, no more wedges that leverage us into darker places. So rejoice. I'm sure Tristan is.