Beyond a day

The older and wiser I become, the less I worry about. There was a time in my life when I grew incredibly anxious over December 25. In elementary school I got real worked up about the gifts my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles had gotten for me. In middle school my concern shifted to the gifts that I would buy for my friends, trying my hardest to calculate a gift just nice enough to look good, but that did not cost a great deal more than what they were spending on me. In high school I worried about what I would wear to the big family dinner; I had an innate desire to impress all of my cousins who lived a couple of hours, but what seemed like a whole world, away from me in Saginaw. I had to be sure that my attire matched the lifestyles of the rich and famous persona they viewed my family and I as for a number of reasons. DRAMA! A comedian I saw perform, once joked that a drunken man must have come up with Christmas and the rest of us were idiots for following suit. Really, what kind of sense does it make to take a tree that naturally grows in nature, cut it down, put lights on it, and put it inside your house and then put big socks (stockings) on your fireplace? Not to mention that it is ludicrous to feel that on Christ’s birthday, all of us should get gifts. I don’t know about you, but that just would not fly at my birthday party.

Around age 17, my parents began to realize the fixation we held on the world’s idea of how we should spend this precious day in the life of every Christian. This year I am proud to say that my entire family was freed from the commercial traditions surrounding Christmas. We recognize the significance of this event in our lives, the day our Savior was born. But we are more focused on the advent, the second coming of Christ our Lord, and how we live our lives in preparation of this, than we are on a single day in time.

During this time of year we have great temptation to get caught up in tradition and singular events. While skimming the various statuses of my facebook friends, I came across many proclaiming resolutions for the New Year. A few even talked about relationships they were leaving in 2007 because they were not worth bringing into the New Year. But who says we have to wait until a big silver ball drops in Times Square to change our lives? Now is the time to live your best life, to be the best you.

What would happen if we looked past the traditionalism and trivialness of events and lived our lives in this and every season based on true principles? What would happen if we forgot about the tree and gifts and spent our time worshipping God and learning to be more Christ-like at Christmas? What would happen if we stopped waiting on the world to tell us that it was okay to make a change, and realized that each new breath we take is a new beginning and a chance to do better? Certainly we would not see the world that we see today. A world where the Christmas and New Years season brings on more divorces, suicides, and bankruptcies, than any other time of the year.

I encourage you to join me in living beyond the day. I will still attend a New Year’s celebration at my church next Monday and I enjoyed every morsel of ham on the 25th, but I realize that real celebrations must first take place in my heart and mind. The party and fixings are simply outward expressions of what I already feel and know to be true inside. I am living out the true meaning of this season, every day of my life.

In the Pain

Integrity is what you do when no one else is looking. My father preached a whole sermon on that sentence once, and it stuck with me forever. Like so many others I had become a master of “saving face” by the age of six. I first learned to put on a front for the mother board at my church, later it was for my parents, or teachers, or even friends. It’s not that I lived two different lives; I just had certain behaviors that I reserved for certain settings. How disintegrable of me. It’s easy to be good in public, but when you’re behind closed doors, it’s a bit more of a test. The truth is you don’t know what you have until it is put to the test.

I have always been a purse girl. The vanity in me admires the fact that Kimmora Lee Simmons has a whole closet in her house, just for handbags. But that’s another blog for another time. When I received my first Christian Dior purse for my 16th birthday, it was a total surprise. I felt like the queen of the world the first time I carried it to school. I knew it was real, but the girls at school didn’t. And they certainly were not going to take my word for it. So, with my consent, my purse went through the fake test. After careful inspection it was the general consensus that my purse was indeed straight off the shelf of some high priced boutique that makes money off insecure/unhappy people trying to buy their way to a fulfilling life. The fact that my purse passed the test, made its genuineness even more exhilarating. Again, my obvious materialism here is another issue, for another blog.

The last time I wrote I was preparing to embark on a search for unspeakable joy. Per advice from a good friend, for seven days I started and ended my day by writing down ten things for which I am thankful. The lists were not hard at all. They spanned the gamut of tangible things like shelter and a good pair of Uggs (a critical necessity in Upstate New York), to things that can’t be touched or felt, like an open mind and talent. So I was smiling for pretty much the entire week. But it’s easy to smile when dwelling on the awesome things that God has done for you.

When I knew that my search for unspeakable joy was over, I was in the middle of a hot mess. Professors gone nuts, peers acting incompetent, folks getting on my last nerve, friends not understanding, even my body was disagreeing with me. Normally I make it through these times with chocolate, some crying, and a mindset that this too shall pass. But if I had captured this joy that I longed for so deeply, I would be able to get through this rough patch differently. I saw God in these times. I saw Him shaping me and molding me in these new trials for which I had no control over. I thanked Him. I thanked Him for the incompetence and insanity and chaos. I thanked Him because I realized that this was apart of my test. He was only giving me what I had asked for. I was not going to find it basking in everything that was going right. If I had it, it would show up when I was engulfed in all the wrong. When I had no joy to pull from, except that deep down inside. That unspeakable joy.

It seems weird, but, in the pain, that’s where I found my unspeakable joy.