This post began as some thoughts I jotted down last year when my husband was a thousand miles away starting a new job (for which we were very thankful) and we had moved out of our house and were staying in a friend’s guest quarters. And here we are, a year later, heading toward another Christmas that isn’t what I’d hoped or planned. Maybe you can relate:

It’s safe to say we’ve never had a Christmas like this one. My husband left to start his new job one thousand miles away. He’ll come back and we’ll end our year loading the rest of our belongings onto a truck.

When Dean and I were dating and first married, our holidays were spent putting hundreds of miles on our cars as we drove to where his family lived for a couple days, journeyed an hour and a half to my family’s Christmas Eve gathering and back, and then spent time with some of his family before making the trek back home.

After we moved to the Northwest for seminary, we added plane travel to the itinerary, often driving an additional five hundred miles or more to make sure we got to visit as many people as we could. There was a lot of hurrying and scurrying, and not much in the way of peace or rest.

Sometimes we wonder if anyone is really paying any attention to our words; if there’s any value in getting them down. There are times Solomon’s words echo through my head, “Of the making of many books, there is no end.” And I wonder if it is a worthy effort to add my own volumes–whether bound with pages or online–to the multitudes still and coming into existence.

God had Moses write down his words to the Israelites. Jesus used stories to communicate God’s truth to his disciples and to the masses who followed Him. And when all was said and done, God gave us a book to remember what He’d done and to reveal Himself to we who live thousands of years later.