Upon entry into World War I, the U.S. military needed to know in a hurry who among its recruits were officer material and who were more sergeant-cook material. So they devised a test for measuring intelligence. 

We Christians are bearers of secrets. I feel that way all the time—whenever the snowbirds winter in Boca Raton and summer in Quebec while I stay stuck in town. Whenever the reflection in the bathroom mirror tells of a soon shedding of this mortal coil. Whenever memory mocks me by refusing to divulge a common household word.

’Tis then that I remember our secret.

I lost my car in Brooklyn. It’s not a long story: I forgot where I parked it. 

“I could have sworn” (a sentence-starter that gets a workout nowadays) it was on Prospect Place between Franklin and Bedford. But when I arrived in the general vicinity a half mile or so from my daughter’s brownstone, as hard as hope tried to conjure a Pennsylvania plate in the chorus line of gold New York tags, there was none.

In my first magazine column of 2020, I wrote about “new life born from sorrow and suffering” and asked: “Are we ready to embrace the suffering to come in the new year? And are we able to look beyond the bad-news headlines to find opportunities for helping neighbors and to glimpse more of the good news to come?”

Allow me to be the first to answer: I was not ready.

“I’m trying to believe in reincarnation,” wrote my best friend from high school, when we were two years out from graduation and trying to figure it all out. If I’d had my wits about me—they were pretty scattered back then—I would have written back, “Let’s talk about incarnation.” 

While celebrating Christmas as hard as it can, the world doesn’t think much about this doctrine. It’s very strange—nothing like it. And yet there’s nothing so oddly resonant, both in Scripture and in history.

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.