A "Deep"-er Epiphany - R. A. Nelson

Well, hi there, 2019.

And greetings, dear readers! I hope your holiday season was full of the Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love upon which we meditated poetically during Advent. We are now still in the Christmas season – it really is twelve full days, folks – but, this Sunday is the feast of Epiphany.

Epiphany, as I wrote in the first post of my How I Became R. A. Nelson blog series, celebrates the visit of the three wise men/kings/magi to the baby Jesus. It symbolizes the revelation of Christ to all the world – not only the Jews, but the Gentiles also. With Epiphany, we celebrate the light of Christ breaking through into the darkness of our world, illuminating the way forward into the glorious future He has promised us.

Last year, my meditations on these beautiful truths developed into a poem. I decided to continue the tradition this year, crafting the poem to be a conclusion to the Advent poetry series (in meter and rhyme scheme, and also in addressing the poem to Light itself).

I actually wrote the poem while sitting in traffic on the long road home from holiday travels. I was reflecting on what a great trip it had been – on the inimitable comfort of being with people I know, and who know me, particularly after a year of trying to build a brand-new life in a new place. It felt . . . grounding, and even reassuring.

Then, as I reflected further on 2018, I realized it has been a year of grounding – or, more specifically, of deepening. It was the first full year of the major lifestyle changes I described in this post: a year of early mornings, earnest labor, and many delightful evenings spent quietly at home with my small, precious family. We were being planted in a new garden, and we spent the whole year putting down roots.

That process is ongoing, and I am grateful for the richness of the soil. Still, I hope 2019 will bring with it some of the fruit from those roots.