It’s Christmas Eve at the farm on Willow Road, and the house is at rest after a busy day of visits, celebration meals, and a lot of calls on Skype to our loved ones as far flung as the U.K.

We also had the annual stream of neighbors – some of whom you’ve been introduced to in years past – bearing the Christmas gifts that will put us in a sugar coma for weeks. But this year, I detected that their motivations were somehow different. It was as if they came bearing these gifts as the cover charge to visit with my three-month-old daughter. I guess I have to face it: the process has begun transforming my wife and I from “Chris and Jocelyn” to “Julia’s parents.”

Nonetheless, I love our time here on the farm. It’s a quiet, simple reminder amid frenetic pace of normal life that the things that really matter are family, friends, … oh yeah, and peanut brittle.

In the afternoon calm between visits, I took a walk down the eastern lane that borders the property. The snow has covered the fields, allowing only a bit of corn stubble to peek through the blanket of white.

There’s a special quality to the air in midwinter, especially when it’s moist and calm like this afternoon. It has almost a dampening effect that covers the land in silence. All I could hear was the snow under my footfalls. As the land dipped, the barns and the rooftops slipped from view; and for that moment, all I saw around me were fields and fencerows, frozen marsh and the russet gray of the trees.

I quietly topped the crest of a hill in the waning light of the afternoon and stopped to see deer striding cautiously out from the woodlot to dig for the shoots of the tilling radishes planted in the fallow of Grandma’s Field. A buck and four doe had braved the cold (and the hunters) to tenaciously hunt for the life that they instinctively knew lay beneath the veneer of cold. I watched, almost hypnotized, as they moved through their cycle of survival – dig, feed, pause, watch for danger – until the cold forced me to turn back for the warmth of the house.

It has long been a tradition for me to sit in the dark of the farmhouse, look back on the year and offer some personal perspective. Well, the year has forced me to exercise some emotional muscles that have never been tapped before. With our daughter Julia’s birth and scary diagnoses of Down Syndrome and a heart defect, Jocelyn and I have seen extremes of excitement, despair, and utter terror that have left us pretty exhausted.

Our family will soon gather to mourn the loss of my Uncle Jim, who died suddenly this Tuesday. I prayed with a friend in the U.K. who has watched his father languish in hospital for three months, only now seeing a glimmer of vitality that brings small hope for recovery. The danger and sadness of this world – in all of its fragility – is real.

But as I sit here with my laptop open and the entire house sleeping, I honestly can’t get those silly deer out of my mind. Despite the danger and any visible sign of anything life-giving, it is their desperation for life that coaxes them to take the risk, step out of the safety of the trees and scratch at the cold ground in search of it.

Death and decay and suffering try to crush anything beautiful and redeeming from this world; but life and the Love that spoke it into being stubbornly push back, awaiting discovery by those who are looking for it.

Somehow (and for reasons that still leave me dumbfounded), God pushed past all of our profound shortcomings, our icy veneer of deceit and self-protection, and found something beautiful and valuable – something worth rescuing. A risk was taken and an Envoy was dispatched to begin and seal the rescue that we – I – so desperately needed. Those whose lives have been transformed by that beauty are called to do the same. Take the risk. Find the Life amid life’s pain.

I find it every day in the beauty of my wife comforting my daughter through her heart-wrenching bouts of colic and steels her heart for the coming surgery. I find it in how our family is drawn together in the sadness of loss to celebrate the life that was well lived. I am humbled as I see friends work tirelessly to leverage their talents for the good of others – from giving Indian orphans a meal and an education to those brave souls still searching out a way forward for the disenfranchised in Detroit.

Whether or not you believe in this whole Jesus thing, rest well in the love that abounds this season – whether or not you see it at first glance. Let that love invade and change your heart, and out of an overflow of that changed heart, represent it well to others.

I give God thanks for all that you do, and wish you all the best for Christmas.