Kien Lam understands big and small. 

For one year, over 17 countries, he photographed his travel adventures, creating time lapse video of the 6,000 pictures he brought home. To watch it is to experience the incongruity of big and small, to see the breadth of the globe and the tiny human stories within it. It is a montage of God’s vast, breathtaking creation mixed with the microcosms of human life. 

I love Lam’s vision. For some reason, the juxtaposition of big and small reminds me of the world God has given to me. On some days God asks me to meditate on his cosmos, and on other days he wants me mop the church floor at some extraordinarily precise coordinates in Clovis, California. I have no doubt God asks me to think big and small.

Note: This post is completely indulgent and it could be totally stupid (my teenage kids tell me it’s probably fifty-fifty). Furthermore, unless you’re in your forties, lived in Texas as a teenager, love Jesus, and have been trolling the internet since its inception, you might not understand a word of it. Feel free to leave now, especially if you’ve enjoyed anything else I’ve written. 

     Like some of you, I’m a strange hybrid of old and young. My formative years spent in the pre-tech 1980s have now collided with my maturing years spent in the tech-saturated new millennium. I was a Bible Belt native not too long ago: big hair, big churches, big shoulder pads, and big regrets in the 90s. With perspective, I can now see what was terribly wrong with us, and yet I haven’t lost my faith in Jesus nor his Church.

Sadness comes in all sizes. Sometimes it’s huge and powerful, a villain worthy of a heroic, medical take-down, and other times it’s just a quiet lump in the throat. Sadness can come on gradually or flash like winter lightning. It sets us up for failure, affecting both the body and spirit. It can surely be contagious. 

And sometimes sadness is exactly the right thing. 

Americans might believe that sadness is the negative detour that keeps us from the unrelenting prosperity and happiness we deserve. We are ashamed of it as though it reveals some weakness, and we attempt to cure it as quickly as it comes. Yet what if the role of sadness firmly belongs in the natural order of things? 

So as a tribute to the month that is colder and darker than the rest, I offer some considerations:

December is unlike any other month. It is the only month that has no immutable identity of its own, but dresses in whatever costume someone chooses for it. 

For children, December is a giddy mess of sparkly things, overly generous adults, and neon molded plastic parts, most of them made in China. The younger the child, the more visceral the holiday. It is a month of touching things, seeing things, tasting things. And when it comes to a retail high, children and grandparents together smoke December like crack. 

For young adults sans kids, December is a messed-up, caffeinated, overwrought season that only pretends to nurture. Twenty-somethings don’t wrap things for each other; they slip gift cards in envelopes--or just walk around at parties with a red plastic cup. College-aged kids see December as earned intermission between two halves, wanting to sleep, troll the internet, eat mom’s food, and smell fabric softener on their sweatshirts for a change. 

It’s no secret that journalism thrives on nasty bacteria more than life-giving oxygen. But this week’s relentless coverage of Very Bad People is making me want to wash my hands every five minutes. 

Kim Kardashian’s faux-marriage reminds me that, at least in Celebrity-America, marriage equals marketing. Justin Bieber and Herman Cain, whom I would never place in the same sentence at any other time in history, both face sordid charges of power-groping. Conrad Murray (Michael Jackson’s unprincipled physician and convict-of-the-week) showed us all that the Hippocratic Oath means about as much as Kardashian’s Oath.  And finally, the entire Penn State football program appears ready to implode over horrific charges of a pedophilia cover-up.

Just when I’m about to take up drinking, I realize that these are only the national stories. My hometown (and yours) has little celebrity symbolism but all of the same stories: the trivialization of marriage, the misuse of power, the abuse of innocent children. The two-dimensional news stories have real people behind them--people whose sins infect the entire world. 

Dumb question.

If the God of creation--the great Hebrew Yahweh who transcends time and eternity--can redeem my immortal soul from sin, I’m sure he can arrange for you to find a mate from the privacy of your own bedroom while you’re dressed in your 1996 sweat pants. 

Surely he can. 

But does He? 

In order to find out, I might need to examine the issue a bit more. If I were to follow the injudicious punctuation of actual Christian dating sites (It’s fast, fun, and FREE! . . . God’s will is waiting!!! . . . At Christian Date we believe in love before money!), I would surely discover that the ratio of members to actual hook-ups corresponds to the number of exclamation marks in their marketing campaigns. But I don’t think God cares much about punctuation.

If Christianity asks for supreme fidelity to the God-man Jesus Christ, then what loyalty do I also pay to his divine book? With mega-publishers, mainline bloggers, trendy theologians, and my local pastor all begging for a slice of my reading time, where does the Bible fit into my library? 

In fact, you’re spending a few of your precious minutes reading some California girl’s opinion on the matter. Shouldn’t you be hunkered down in your prayer closet re-reading Paul’s epistles instead--or even better, reading through the red text in your Bible? 

Maybe I’m better off reading nothing but the Holy Scriptures--a modern monk-girl practicing Lectio Divina.  But should I also savor the insights and writing talents of God’s children? Can God also speak through the ideas of my contemporaries--or even more shocking, can he speak directly to my spirit? I wish I were the first one to bring this to the table, but I’m one of many who have questioned if the Biblical text is enough. Enough for my intellect. Enough for my spirit. Enough for my faith. 

When I grew up, persecution was a dark and powerful force--the frightening oppression of a group of people whose origins, race, class system, or religion were systematically abused by those in power.

But today if you’re an American teenager, you can easily own a share of such suffering.

We know that the narrative of suffering is one of literature’s most enduring archetypes. Nearly every fairy tale or legend has at its core an element of persecution. Whether it’s Cinderella herself, rapper Eminem, or the narrator in Dave Pelzer’s bestseller A Child Called It, the suffering narrative speaks to teenagers in particular because, by comparison, they probably feel relieved to know that their own lives are not as lousy they thought.  

Lately, however, the suffering narrative has become a slick marketing campaign for everything from LGBT power to a cheaply made T-shirt. Apparently, whatever you want to sell to teenagers, especially an ideology, is best sold when it’s shrink wrapped in persecution. 

You grew up sitting in various pews, but after getting a dose of higher education, you’re not really into anything that smacks of organized religion. After studying the Crusades, learning what jihad really means, and reading ten bloggers rant about the Pope’s pedophile cover-up, you figure that all of these manmade institutions aren’t credible. The Church—any church—is just a nasty, manmade construct designed to give uneducated, needy people some scaffolding.

On the other hand, you also think that God probably exists, and Jesus and the Buddha and Mother Teresa were onto something good. You don’t want to adopt the atheist’s combative edge or the agnostic’s arrogant philosophizing, so you snuggle down into the cozy netherworld of Spiritual Living. It’s a one-size-fits-all accommodating worldview fed by books like Eat, Pray, Love and The Secret. Spiritual Living lets you pray for wisdom or wear cool T-shirts or even go to silent retreats where you can stare at the ocean for a long time. It’s tapas-style dining where you order tasty little samples of  religion’s best ideas—without the prix fixe risk. Come to think of it, if you don’t trust the chef to choose for you, it might be better to pick a different restaurant altogether.

When the family pet, who doesn’t leap anymore, whose broken teeth and wobbly gait has been warning you of its inevitable decline, dies in your daughter’s arms at your neighborhood animal hospital, it’s time to write.

This isn’t the essay about how parents should use this opportunity to teach children about life and death, the reminder that “all things come to an end” or that “Jesus cares about our pets, too.” Those are sweet things to consider. It is not, however, what I’m thinking about as I wonder what to do with the sad vacancy that hovers around my house now like a shadow at different times of day. 

The essay I want to write goes two directions: one is personal and cathartic, the piece of writing that fulfills a human need to work out my emotions in a concrete form. When a sadness comes, some people go home and bake a pie, some make a photo album, others clean out the garage. For me, I write. The essay’s other direction is far more generous. It’s the piece of the essay that realizes you don’t really give a rip about my cat. You just want in on the story yourself.