Basketballer Kobe Bryant wore numbers 8 and 24 during his 20 years with the Los Angeles Lakers. The week before Christmas, ESPN exuberantly reported a ceremony during which “the Lakers great had both of his numbers retired, and they will hang in the Staples Center rafters forever.”

No, they won’t. Someday that arena will fall down or be torn down.

Romance novelist Tessa Dare has one of her characters say, “I’m going to build that house with my own hands, from the foundation to the roof. I’m going to do it for us, and I’m going to do it right, so it lasts forever.”

There are things God commands us to do that it seems He can’t possibly mean literally, until we encounter a person who has actually done them. Praise God for such individuals! This is the power of testimony. Testimonies are a sermon plus. They convey God’s will but also flesh it out in ways unambiguous and inescapable for the rest of us.

As we begin a new year, it is well to remember that you won’t be the same person next year as you are this year. You will be a better person or a worse one, but you will not be the you who now reads these words. Things will happen (that you can’t help), and you will make choices (that you can help). Robert Frost, because poets are not statisticians, spoke of two roads diverging in a yellow wood that “has made all the difference.” But it would be more accurate to describe an ever-branching outcropping of paths beneath your feet that lead to Christ-likeness or its opposite.

’Tis 2018 by the clock, and “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).

The experience of time passing is either pleasant or unpleasant depending on one’s readiness. I had planned, in days before the Christmas guests arrived, to clean the house, adorn the tree, bake bread, and print copies of A Christmas Carol for group reading.

Here’s the old-school materialist of the last century, sitting in his library before a cozy fire, puffing on a pipe. “Of course all religions are foolishness, but Christianity is the worst. It’s deliberately anti-science, you see; bases its claims on ‘historical’ events that never could have happened. Take the Incarnation: We are asked to believe that a human female was impregnated by a nonhuman spirit and gave birth to a God-man. How ridiculous is that?”

One year on a chilly Sunday evening, Dec. 29, a small group had gathered at the church where I worshipped. The Sunday night crowd was usually less than half the size of Sunday morning’s, and it was Christmas week besides, but our pastor preached as faithfully to scattered sheep as he would have to packed pews. For this sermon he borrowed a theme from his own grandfather, also a pastor, and notes from 1949 (before most of us were even born).

I love the smell of my parents’ house. I visited my parents in Northern Virginia this Thanksgiving, and the moment I walked in, I smelled the pungent, crisp whiff of my mother’s fresh-made kimchi—traditional Korean fermented cabbage, still raw and crunchy in the giant stainless steel bowl she uses to massage the vegetables with chili paste. As I kissed my father’s cheek hello, I smelled his familiar aftershave. Then I ran upstairs to kiss my mother, and smelled her sweet milky lotion.