Town on a Hill

"You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."

―The Gospel of Matthew

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Dear Kate,

I've always wanted to build me a Christmas town.  Specifically a mining Christmas town, which I was once invited to imagine on a hot summer day.  My imagination was hot enough for me to feel the chill.

I said "to build me a Christmas town," for myself first and then others to see, or should it be the other way around?  Can a piece of news from my mouth be of any good to the world if it's not good enough for me?

Yesterday I jumped off a bus.  A corner of my eye caught magic and I flipped.  Off the stop I bounced and back to where it caught me, a shop that sells pens--and other stuffs, but enough pens to call themselves a "pen shop," harkening to a bygone age, on display for the world to see.

For the world to see.  See what?  See itself under an old new light.  And see Me in it too, Me the re-creator, recreating with the Creator.

"Father Daughter Snowflake Dance": can you find the piece in the picture?  The good news that was once possible is announced again to an impossible world, a world made impossible for our togetherness by the impossibility of Me.

What is meant to be Peace we now declare war with, can't get ourselves to say Merry Christmas without feeling like a suicide bomber, ready to be martyred for two beautiful words put together, the magical chemistry between them now mere pyrotechnics in this unpeaceable age.  There really is nothing we haven't done to tell God to get lost.

Now the daughter is missing her father, out there in the bitter cold with snowflake just as pure and white and beautiful as ever, couldn't get herself to dance and fuel the movement of this world with her heart on fire, skates on ice, living into and out of everything in between.  She's in her living room, alone, aging, staring at the illusion of a 4K fireplace, her rectangular world of impossibilities: relationship, housing, health, finance, and other troubles so she thinks.

A pen with my name on it, I still remember the Sunday School teacher who made it for me, in a different part of the world she said, decades ago right before I left Hong Kong, she traveled for work and I the first and final time to leave our past behind.

Yours, Alex