by Steve Van Winkle
I finished reading the handwritten, gilded script on the face of the paper:
November 24, 1983.
A few minutes earlier, I was making my way toward a house in the distance that sparked a memory, without being familiar in this neighborhood of two-dimensional houses where no one lived, lined with sidewalks no one strolled along, and streets that went nowhere — gray and dark gray were the only colors.
How I arrived here, I couldn’t say; I didn’t belong here but neither was I a stranger. As shadows twisted on the ground from an icy wind whipping leafless branches stiffly under a stark, lifeless sky, this Neverland seemed exactly as I had left it, despite having never been here.
The concrete path leading to the house was strewn with rubble. Jagged chunks of debris from buildings mingled with furniture fragments, and charred fabrics snagged on exposed rebar to form chaotic monuments of things that were no more.
I traversed this urban wilderness where debris often forced me off the path onto unfamiliar terrain. Every few feet confronted me with a decision about where to place my next step; the destruction laying all around seemed to warn that poor choices at these junctions were punished mercilessly.
I nearly reached the house when I froze with terror. I recognized this rubble. This destruction was the catastrophic result of decisions I had seen people make in moments of hurt, self-deception, or in the throes of uncertainty.
The world spun as I frantically looked for evidence of my own life amid the ruins. It seemed futile from the outset, but I was driven by a fear that perhaps everything I knew to be true about my family was only conjured to keep me sane in this world I woke up to where friendship and love are inevitably reduced to rubble.
My search ended as peace displaced panic with the calm assurance my life wasn’t in ruins; it wouldn’t be found in this debris field.
Turning to the house, I walked through the final feet of destruction and stepped onto the porch. I stood looking out onto the neighborhood, windswept, sterile, and dead.
Wind scraped my cheeks and I resisted the urge to turn around. When I did, a weathered screen door with mesh peeling from the corners greeted me. Rusted hinges that withstood my pull finally gave way with a scream, and I pushed open the cracked, careless front door. A tattered tapestry that once covered its grimy glass dangled from an edge, falling off when I pushed open the door.
Foreboding chilled me at the impulse to move forward. Though nothing of mine lay in the fallout along the street, I knew that was about to change. I had never been here before, but I knew, somehow, this house was mine.
Stepping through the door, the musty smell of time assaulted my senses. My eyes darted, saving my head the trouble of turning. Among outdated couches, chairs, and sundry tables stacked aimlessly beneath peeling wallpaper and yellowing curtains, piles of … stuff … dotted the room.
The piles were made of items believed necessary for happiness or satisfaction at one time or another. Now just heaping mounds of crumbling, fraying obsolescence, everything from hobbies to appliances were cluttering the room; all worthless now; none living up to the expectation of their purchase.
The floor creaked as I lifted a foot toward photo albums stacked haphazardly in a corner. Pausing before lifting a cover, within I discovered pictures of someone I once knew: Me. They were images of me younger, me stronger, me innocent, me ideal.
Dust puffed up with each page turned, and the pictures told my history. Beginning as a vibrant young guy running headlong into life, they eased into a middle-aged man bracing against the throes of life, and, finally, they foreshadowed a graying elder unable to hold onto life any longer than God wills.
With the evidence surrounding me in this room, I considered again that, indeed, nothing lasts forever and we all age into people we never expected to be. I was somehow fine with that, but, I also understood such peace with the passage of time wasn’t natural.
I had met many people who seemed to try filling an invisible hole with fads or the newest things. Others appeared to consider nothing more valuable than youth or beauty; for them, life seemed to be about freezing a moment, refusing to accept that life itself is the one thing we can’t hold onto in life.
This room invited such pursuits and welcomed distractions from this truth. That it was in disrepair suggested it had been abandoned long ago.
Sudden sounds of destruction snapped my head around where I saw an opening leading further into the house. Hard crashes directed my steps along the oddly curving, dim hallway until I stopped at the edge of a room casting fleeting shadows out its door. The shadows coincided with the breakage of things smacking the floor; the vibrations of the impacts reverberated to my feet.
My head slowly peeked in to where my feet feared to take me. This room was expansive, colorful as I peered inside. The high ceiling appeared as severely blue skies dotted with drifting, friendly white clouds.
Optimism greeted me here; nothing seemed impossible. I felt a smile invade my face as I took in the warmth of the moment, and my eyes closed to let anticipation wash over me.
Almost as soon as they closed, my eyelids registered darkness and opened to a different sight. The room grew sullen as resignation rolled in like a mist; a flash of shadow drew my gaze upward.
A cloud dropped from above and shattered hopelessly onto the floor; in the pieces before me I found images of what never were. With frantic urgency I tried salvaging every sliver of the remains, but each time I reached out to gather, they vanished.
The cycle repeated itself, always ending with me exercising the futility of trying to repair that which defied saving. For a reason I didn’t understand, my attempts continued compulsively until I finally recognized in the shards something personal, something devastating: Dreams.
With each piercing sound, I witnessed a dream shatter — my dreams. Dreams of success and importance, dreams of achievement and creativity, dreams subtle and bold that never materialized in my life crashed to the floor and broke in front of the dreamer.
I stood to leave, not for the reason I expected, but because sadness over their final collapse escaped me. I somehow knew that, had I pursued these lesser dreams, I never would have dreamt the better ones that architected my life.
After a final turn to look upon the dreams I never captured, I backed into the dark hallway once more; it pulled me further down its length. Somewhere, I stole a moment to consider what was happening.
There was no answer for how I arrived here; was this a dream? It had to be. But, why did I feel a connection to this place I had never been?
Remembering the destruction on the street, I wondered not so much at how lives had blown up for taking a wrong step or indulging a fleeting sin or reacting to hardship without consulting faith. I wondered at how mine was never blown sky-high for the same reasons, why pieces of my life weren’t found in the wreckage.
I was no superman, not above the temptations and bewilderments that consumed others’ lives. How did my steps not fall on mines? How did my selfishness not trigger an explosion?
I didn’t know.
I thought back on the things eaten of oxidation and time waiting for me inside the front door; I remembered them all with a note of disappointment. I remembered the guy in the pictures. He thought he’d never age. He thought life would always serve him.
He thought he’d never be me.
After spending decades I can’t account for, I know now there is a way all flesh goes. I know obsolescence is built as deeply into life as vibrancy, and no one can keep his or her life or times from becoming an eventual anachronism.
So, why hadn’t despair accompanied me through the years? Why had I not cried out like Solomon about life’s vanity, ultimately despising everything because I could keep nothing?
A moment ago I was audience to the final collapse of dreams I cradled for years before their shelf life expired. Why wasn’t it bothersome?
Everything wove together and wrapped around a single question. Despite experiencing lives of friends in ruin, days of youth vanish, and dreams die, the only thing troubling me in this colorless Neverland was, ”Why me?”
Why was my life not strewn in the streets? Why was I not clinging to what cannot be kept? Why was I fine in the irreparable splatter of my own dreams? Why was this neighborhood, this house, not the sum of my own life?
Laughter flowing over my shoulder startled me, then beckoned me. Turning toward it, cautious steps guided by anxious eyes navigated a long curve in the hall. I peered around the bend to see light flooding in from a doorway. As I approached it, the brilliance dimmed to an inviting glow that was warm against my face and in my spirit.
The room within was obscured by a circle of windows that spun like a carousel. Composing my focus in the brightness, I saw in each window moments from my life — the best moments.
I saw the birth of my children on one. On another, the first sermon I ever preached as a pastor. I saw Cheryl take my hand and felt the warm press against mine as we clung to each other when life washed too far upon our shore.
Windows rolled by like credits on my life, and I caught glimpses of smiles from people I never knew I had helped. I watched choirs of kids in makeshift sets of cardboard and cotton balls sing of God’s love in holiday pageants. I beheld again some of those same kids standing before me reciting wedding vows.
I saw my own daughter’s smile on the day she repeated them after me.
This was my life. These were the better dreams that made life worthwhile and the prizes that couldn’t be purchased.
The visions came faster and faster. I watched my wife play with our kids on grass as green as emeralds; I saw smiling faces stream by me in lines on Pastor Appreciation Day; I listened to prayers and singing; and saw myself give my mom’s new husband permission to kiss her after their wedding ceremony.
Standing there, I realized these were more than random scenes; they were answers to unspoken questions — Would I matter? Who would I marry? What would my kids be like? Would we be happy? … These moments reminded me of the happiness found in the answers and that a more blessed life couldn’t have been scripted if I wrote it myself.
Here, as the carousel slowed, I heard Cheryl say again, “I’ll never leave you.” I felt Madison leap into my arms with abandon when she was a little girl; my daughter Baylee’s patented hugs enveloped me. My eyes closed in renewal, opening to see a single card drop out of a window.
I knew this card, just like I knew its author had survived falling out his own window when he was a toddler. This was the note our son, Hayden, gave us just before his senior night football game. I read the words like sacred prose. The ending said everything,
… And, most of all, thank you for always believing in me … you guys reminded me that I can do anything because Cheryl and Steve Van Winkle believe I can.
– Your biggest fan, Hayden
When my eyes, heavy with joy, looked up, one window remained. I saw me, kneeling beside my bed decades ago, praying. It was Thanksgiving 1983, and this was my first genuine prayer asking Christ, by his grace, to save me from my own sin. This moment would seize my life; it was here all the answers to questions I never knew to ask at the time were born.
Then, the carousel picked up speed, spun faster and faster until it became a blur and ejected all the windows onto the wall like portraits of time. When they did, a flash of light hit me so forcibly that my arms instinctively shielded my face.
The light faded and I sheepishly looked out from my own forearms to the first thing to make sense since my journey began. I was home, in the house I knew and the living room I remembered. It was immersed in welcome and aglow with peace, and, in its familiar place stood … a Christmas tree.
The only light in the room, its softly colored bulbs bounced brightly off the surface of deep glass ornaments, surrounding me with the colors of joy. The garland encircling the tree seemed strung with hope and laughter and life. Above it, a star shimmered like a diamond in the sun, and heavenly notes cascaded down onto me under its brightness.
This was my life. My bleak tour ended, my heart ached in gratitude to be home.
Only one present lay beneath the tree, a box that fit in the palm of my hand. Picking it up, I pulled on the golden ribbon and cautiously opened the lid.
Inside was only a small slip of paper, folded in half. The face of it had two lines of crimson text:
To: Steve
November 24, 1983
I unfolded the tiny paper tent; this is all it said:
Life. Abundant and Eternal.
I finally understood. Here was the ultimate answer to “Why me?” — Why was my life not in ruins? Why was I not raging against life’s inevitable end? Why was I not bitter over dreams unrealized?
Christmas.
The life I love was gifted me on that night thousands of years ago when God became flesh in a manger on a lonely hillside in Bethlehem. Bound up in the Christ child was the ultimate answer. In new wonder, I understood this gift that had saved me from my sin had also saved me from that musty, menacing house and that freezing wasteland of a neighborhood.
Suddenly, it all made beautiful sense. That house was dilapidated not from time nor from neglect or tragedy; it was broken down, dark, and foreboding because it had never been used.
Because selfishness hadn’t overtaken my life, because lesser dreams weren’t pursued at the expense of the best ones, because my life hadn’t been about the moment, it was the house that never was. I had never lived there.
None of which was a credit to me; I was only the beneficiary of a gift. This gift of God was given me the night He declared to the world that, in receiving His son, sin would be defeated and we who sat in darkness need no longer grope down dark hallways, desperately fumbling for life and joy.
Because, in the gift of Christmas, is an exchange of futility and lament for a lifetime of splendor found in irreplaceable, sublime moments made possible only by glad tidings of great joy.
This gift is offered to us all in Christ … It is the gift of escaping the house that never was.