We began the Christmas celebration a bit early this year with a trip last week to one of our favorite get-away locations. Chemainus is a little town on Vancouver Island with murals on the sides of many of the buildings depicting various aspects of the town’s history. It’s a fascinating collection that you can read about here. But it wasn’t the murals that drew us there this time.The town’s other claim to fame is an excellent live community theater, and the current offering is Miracle on 34th Street. It was the play that drew us there this time. So there we were, eight days before Thanksgiving, sitting with a couple of hundred other people to enjoy a Christmas play. It was a well done presentation, good enough to convince us that there would be more Chemainus Theater Festival adventures in our future. And it was a play that left me thinking.
There is a line from Miracle on 34th Street that has been rolling around in my head for the past week: “Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.” It’s not exactly a biblical definition of faith, but it’s not a bad one, either. And it comes close to the description in Hebrews 11: the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.Encountering genuine faith can be a surprisingly rare thing, even, strangely enough, among people who call themselves believers. Life does not train us to believe when common sense tells us not to. And common sense, while compelling, turns out to be not all that common either. And so we end up desiring to be more sensible instead of more trusting. It is a strange trade-off in which we are the ultimate losers, and both faith and miracles get lost because we cannot see or dare not hope.
I’m glad we started Christmas before Thanksgiving this year. It seems fitting to me that one should approach both holidays thinking about both faith and miracles. I am thankful for the blessings that I have experienced and seen. But I need to be thankful as well for the miracles I have not yet seen. God invites me to hope, and this year as Thanksgiving gently leads the way towards Christmas, I choose to have faith enough to thank God for both the miracles that are and the miracles that are on the way.
