When we were children, our parents taught us that “please” and “thank you” were magic words. “Pass the mashed potatoes” was not effective. “Please pass the mashed potatoes” was. We were already learning how to navigate a daunting world. 

Editor’s note: As Joel Belz recovers from a broken hip, we’re republishing this column, which originally appeared on Dec. 20, 1997.

Heading toward Christmas, there’s no better time to remind ourselves there are two crucial parts to this thing we call a Biblical worldview: the talking part and the doing part.

God built us in such a way that we need something to look forward to. I don’t think you need me to prove that to you; I think you know. We function better, and we’re happier, when we have that. We’ve been spending more time in the house recently—locked down, masked up, distanced.

But I believe that all over the world people feel the same need to have something to look forward to. And the need is so strong that they will find something, even where there’s nothing.

Scene 1: My son snagged a parking spot to crow about, smack in front of his row house in inner-city Philadelphia. Around 1 a.m. his housemate woke him: “Bro! Your car’s on fire.” Turns out a trash can was burning on the curb by his vehicle. It sure looked weird when it was over—the hood and half the passenger side of his once-proud wheels skinned and bubbled like an escapee of Hitler’s scorched-earth retreat from the Eastern front.

Whenever I’m driving through unfamiliar urban terrain, the same line from the Bible comes to mind. I don’t have to conjure it; it just comes “as the sparks fly upward,” to quote Job. Here it is: “In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune.”

Not very lofty, right? Not “The Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1), or “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you” (Psalm 91:11).

My father gave me my first tip on writing. His own writing was limited to the jotting of room measurements for the installation of carpets and linoleum. While all he did was run a furniture store, I, at the tender age of 10, was being asked to return to school the next morning with a composition. I understand they don’t call them compositions anymore.

Sometimes I wish my editors would assign me a specific topic to talk about on this penultimate page of the magazine, but they don’t, and neither did Soeur Jeanne de Valois. Hence my terror, then and now. 

On a recent Saturday, I didn’t speak to my husband for a whole day. Something had happened that triggered memories from our first year of dating, fanning a dusty cloud of hurts and wounds that I had assumed were long ago swept away. But no, there they were, settled in the dark corners of my heart, and all it took was one forceful blow to blast them out into the open.