Every time we drove over this bridge, he’d say he loved this spot. It really was beautiful. The water moved fast, and everything else always seemed beautifully still. I took this picture as I drove over that bridge without him once. With four children in the car, I pulled over to the side on that old bridge and texted him a modern postcard, a little “I know you love this place and now so do I.”
The bridge is a humble bridge, made even more humble by what surrounds it. While it isn’t worthy of a picture with its layers of paint, chipping bolts, and repair scars, there’s something remarkable about it simply by definition of what it is. Bridges amaze me. They are long thought out and planned for; every detail is accounted for. Their construction is time consuming, labor intensive, and costly. All that because a bridge needs to be safe; it’s no good if it is not. A bridge makes a way where there is no way. Even the most humble bridge becomes beautiful when you see it that way.
We’ve been reading this month together, sometimes reading stories that seemingly had nothing to do with Christmas. Joseph and his technicolor dream coat? A big tower people built to try to reach heaven? Where’s the wee three kings? Where’s the heavenly angels singing? But, every story we’ve read and every story we haven’t read were all part of God’s long thought out plan, every detail accounted for. All of it led to the perfect blueprint for the most remarkable bridge, expertly executed as only He could do. This God, our God, He made a way where there was no way because He’s a waymaker. That baby born on Christmas, the one the kings sought out to find, the ones the angels sang about, and the one that stirred Herod’s jealous heart, He’s the bridge. And, all these stories help us better understand the bridge rather than simply focusing on the world around it, and they help us see how desperately we need that bridge and how stuck we would be without it.