Yet, despite having millions of the redeemed of all the ages with Him at His side night and day, Jesus, on a night long ago, stepped down from that place and onto this Earth because there was at least one lost soul left that He wanted to have with Him (see John 17:24). That one lost soul is you and He left not ninety-nine but countless millions to make sure that you, if you want, can forever be with Him, healed, restored and reconciled to be what He always meant for you to be.

Here, too, is the place for us to build a grand suspension bridge, by which, through faith, we ourselves may cross from this side to the other of the stormy river of time....At his first advent, we adore him with gratitude, rejoicing in 'God with us', as making himself to be our near kinsman. We gather with grateful boldness around the infant in the manger, and behold our God. But in the second advent we are struck with a solemn reverence, a trembling awe.

There was little he could do except pray and wield a powerful pen. There was a helplessness in his situation that he recognized as a parallel to Advent, Christians' time of waiting for redemption in Christ. 'Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent,' Bonhoeffer wrote his best friend Eberhard Bethge, as the holidays approached in 1943.

We know that life is not perfect in this world, and can never be so. Utopia is a false dream. Political attempts at utopian social engineering are bound to fail. Ideological blueprints may work in theory but never seem to succeed in human experience. There are too many variables to consider, too many unintended consequences to solve. One man's program becomes another's burden. One gains at the other's expense.