Merry Christmas, ya'll. I'm out until the New Year.
The holiday season has a long-standing reputation of changing the way people treat each other. During Christmas season, people seem cheerier and kinder and more generous. In most cases, anyway. At my school, I work with a large urban and low-income population. The holidays seem to bring about the opposite effect in many of my students who feel more anxiety than joy this time of year. All the commercialism of the holiday season doesn't help the less financially fortunate students who hear the same buzz surrounding gifts that the rest of us hear. Beyond the financial aspect, the pressure to enjoy family time can magnify the dysfunction that many of my students go home to every day.
Regardless of our socio-economic status, the media sells us all many ideas about Christmas. In fact, the media has re-created Christmas into a completely non-religious time of feasting and playing which has done a disservice to all of us, not only the less fortunate. They say it's about getting, they say it's about giving, they say it's about reconnecting with family. In all of this noise, the real meaning of the holiday is lost. While at least the latter two on this list are certainly important and certainly help improve what we call the holiday spirit, none of these ideas is what Christmas is really about. Of course, even Christians purport that the season is all about giving and all about being with family, so it's no wonder that we're all confused. Again, these things are wonderful, but the Christian lifestyle should include these things all year. For Christains, Christmas should be a special time because it is about more than the every day.
Putting the Christ back in Christmas requires recognizing and honoring His birth above and beyond what we do every day. Yes, we can honor Him by honoring each other, but if we forget about Him and think only of each other during this season, then we are missing the point entirely. Luke 2:11 sums up what we are celebrating: "Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord." Christmas is the day we honor the birth of our Savior, without home none of us would have reason or hope, and without whom no light would be found in our dark world. Christmas is an honorary day that marks the beginning of a life that would change the destinies of countless generations of people. Christmas demonstrates God's abundant love for us that He would send His light into the world so that we would have a choice between staying in darkness and walking in the light, between being bound by the chains of our sin and soaring in freedom with Him. Christmas is about God's grace and God's generosity. We can celebrate that through our grace and generosity to each other, but we must be careful that reason behind our celebration doesn't get lost in the cultural noise surrounding the holiday.
Most Christians will tell you that they don't believe in luck. Luck implies there is some chance to the world, and that contradicts the sense of security that Christians like to cling to with the belief that nothing happens that God doesn't say gets to happen. Job is certainly evidence that even bad things that happen pass through God's filter. Of course, the book of Job also provides evidence that there is a whole lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that we will never be privy to. Perhaps our limited vision and complete inability to understand the whys behind the whats is the reason we came up with the concept of luck, which for simplicity's sake is what I will refer to in the rest of this post.
Overall, both my life and John's has been quite blessed. I could write paragraph after paragraph about my day to day bad luck when things go wrong for no apparent reason and John's day to day good luck when things go right for him even when the odds are stacked against him. I could also write about how now that we are married our two differents kinds of "luck" seem to have collided. I won't bore you with those details or with the details of our early conflicts about the concept of good luck being at all connected to good living. What I will say, is that whether or not you consider it luck or you consider it Satan trying to screw us over, we have had a few pretty unfortunate adventures since we've been together starting with the freak early-July hurricane on what was supposed to be our wedding day. Fortunately, even when bad luck strikes, we have been able to see God working through the fire.
Between last night and this morning, we had two unlucky things happen in a 12-hour period. First, our dog started choking on a piece of rawhide last night. She panicked and started whining and then yelping when she couldn't figure out what was happening. John managed to grab her in her state of panic and hold her down. He was somehow able to maneuver her until the rawhide came loose, and in doing so he saved her life. Both Felicia and I were quite traumatized by her near-death experience, but God gave John the grace to remain calm. Then this morning we locked ourselves out of our new house. We went out to the garage and the door locked behind us. We had no keys, no cell phones, and no jackets. Lucky for us it's been an oddly warm December in Maryland! This time, John was more upset than I was. He wanted to break a window. I wanted to knock on a neighbor's door and call my mom with the spare key. He started hitting our door knob with a softball bat. Metal banging on metal at 6:30 in the morning. I can only imagine how much our neighbors love us. Then I noticed our neighbor from across the street getting into his car. This is someone who introduced himself to us when we were moving in, so I already knew him a little bit. I walked as fast as I could in my heels across the street to ask him if he had a phone we could use. He did, and he was happy to let me borrow it and even walked to our house to see if John needed him to help with anything. Right after I called my mom to come with the key, John managed to break our doorknob off and use a fire poker to trick the lock and get us inside. We will have to replace the door knob, but that will be cheaper than the door and certainly cheaper than a window if John had broken one. And we still managed to make it to work before first period began!
In our lives the good luck moments surely outweigh the bad, but usually the bad luck situations make for better stories. Especially when the bad works out. Even in the lives of people where the bad seems to outweigh the good, it is still true that we will all have seasons of suffering and seasons of rejoicing, and moments of suffering and moments of rejoicing in all seasons. The ratio of good to bad for each of us is for God to decide, and we should trust that He has His reasons. He holds all of eternity in His hand, and He can see the purpose behind what we see as chaos. God knows the whys behind the whats, even in a situation like this morning where I can see no why behind us being locked out. God is in control in both the blessings and the curses. Just as He gives, He can take away, and if we follow Him, we must be willing to accept both (Job 2:10). When we put God in the driver's seat, we soon learn that we're just along for the ride, wherever He may choose to take us. Maybe some days like this morning, all He wants is for us to look to our side and remember who's in charge.
John and I moved into our new house last weekend (still waiting on the old house to sell!). We've spent a good deal of the past week unpacking boxes. I put the master bedroom boxes off as long as I could, mainly because the job seemed overwhelming. At our former house, I essentially had 2 1/2 closets to myself. Even though our new house is bigger, we would like to consilidate and keep all of our clothes in one room, which meant that I had to find space in my one closet for 7 large boxes of stuff. To say I was intimidated would be putting it mildly. Now, the interesting part is that I unpacked three suitcases worth of clothing the first night after our move. I had been surviving just fine on the clothes from these three suitcases, using the still-packed boxes as tables to rest hairbrushes, scissors, and my gym bag. To most bystanders, it would make sense to question what I needed with those 7 extra boxes of clothes. Granted, some of them were filled with warmer weather clothes and shoes, but some simply held more sweaters and sweatshirts and other winter attire. Yesterday, our pastor talked about the poor at church, and coming back to our house after that sermon, it became clear to me that I have an absolutely obscene amount of stuff.
God has blessed me with tremendous wealth. Not wealth like Tom Cruise or Jennifer Aniston, but the same kind of wealth that most Americans take for granted. God has blessed us with a beautiful home, two cars (and we both work at the same place!), and an abundance of clothes and other possessions. We have a warm bed to sleep in at night and hot water in our showers in the morning. Between the two of us, we have four televisions, three DVD players, two surround sound systems, three computers, countless DVD's, VHS tapes, and CD's, a pantry and a refridgerator overflowing with food, and more blankets than will comfortbaly fit into our linen closet. When I stepped back yesterday and looked at all that we own that I take for granted, I was sickened. By America's standards, we aren't even considered wealthy, we're considered middle class. Yet we moved into our new house with an obnoxious excess of baggage that most of the world's population could not even imagine. Who am I to ever go to God asking for more when I have far more than my share already? I must seem so disgustingly ungrateful to Him. Pages could be written about why it's difficult for the rich to enter God's kingdom (Matthew 19:24). I won't try to tackle that issue here other than to say that living in our society of excess, it's easy to get so distracted by what you don't have that you forget to be thankful for what you do have.
On this note, I finally decided to start opening the boxes in the bedroom with my name on them. I emptied two boxes that the box company labeled "extra large" and began to fill them with clothes and shoes that I had no business hording any longer. We will drop these clothes off to AmVets this week. And because I have such an obscene amount of stuff, I don't expect to feel the loss too sorely if at all. I am awed that God would bless me with so much knowing how despicably ungrateful my heart would be towards the abundance. I live in a society of more, more, more, but that is no excuse for my own greed. Christians are called to live God's way, not the world's way (1 Peter 2:11). God has given me much, and I don't want to be blind to His blessings. I want Him to use all He has given me for His kingdom and His purposes--for His glory and not mine. Jesus said, "Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given" (Luke 12:48). God has given me much, much more than what I need. As long as He chooses to bless me, I want to thank Him for it and pray that I would be increasignly open to opportunities to return to Him what He has given to me by blessing others in His name.
Maybe it's because it's the holidays or maybe it's because I'm finally ready to process my feelings almost 5 years later, but I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. I spent most of my life from puberty on angry at him. I was angry at all the ways he hurt me over the years and all the mixed messages his words sent me. I blamed him for so much. I remember when I was in therapy in college for my eating disorder, my dad asked me what I talk to my therapist about. I think I meekly said something like, "Oh, just life in general. You know, school and stress," but I was really thinking, "You, Dad."
It wasn't until my recent ponderings that I began to accept responsibilty for my own role in our torn relationship. He might have been confused about how to handle my budding pre-teen hormones, but I certainly did nothing to make his job as a father easier. In fact, I was pretty nasty to him. I didn't recognize his insecurities and I took his moods so personally that I began to build up a wall around myself. A wall that I would not let him penetrate even up to his demise. He reacted to me based on his insecurities, and I lashed out at him based on mine. Self-defense in the face of a perceived attack. On both sides. A vicious cycle that only death could stop.
Soon after my father's death, I had to face my own guilt about not being able to save him. At the time I felt for some reason this was something I could have done that day or the day before. Now I realize it is a process I would have had to begin years before. I prided myself on my piety, but I didn't show unconditional and overflowing love to the man who helped conceive me and raise me into adulthood. I thought I was honoring my parents by obeying them, but obedience and duty aren't enough. I loved him from behind my wall, but not well enough or clearly enough for him to trust my love. I suppose he loved me in the same type of way, and I faulted him for that without realizing I was guilty of the same crime. We perpetuated each other's insecurities instead of healing them and so the cycle continued.
I wanted so badly to make him proud. I thought if I was good enough, he'd finally give me a clear message that he loved me unconditionally. And then I thought that I would be free to give him the same message. Now I see that he pobably wanted the same acceptance from me that I craved from him. I was so angry that I never let him feel like he was good enough. I hurt him to protect myself and he did the same. We hurt each other with our own self-obsession that further built up the wall separating us. And almost 29 years after we first met and 5 years after his death, I still have a lot of healing to do.