We love the holidays and we hate the holidays AND I think sometimes we love to hate the holiday season. The fall/winter holiday season is actually quite difficult and stressful for most people, I think. We have fun and we are blessed with family moments, laughter, special foods, extra sweets, and everyone making even more of an effort to participate in the family happenings.
By the same token, we face the responsibility of creating opportunities for all those blessings to come our way. We tend to go into debt for gift giving. We put pressure on ourselves to live up to whatever expectations we’ve got going on in our heads (or perhaps the expectations we believe are going on in other people’s heads). We spend hours on our feet cooking and baking, only to also gain weight for our efforts.
Life will always find a way to remain in balance. What is good in our eyes can also bring some bad in one fashion or another. What is bad in our eyes can be used for good by God, IF we allow Him to do so. This means that we can’t wallow in the bad we see, but instead be willing to find whatever good we can.
“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Philippians 4:8 ESV
For us, as humans, bad comes with a cost…a loss of some kind, whether physical, emotional, or imagined. For God, bad comes with an opportunity to provide good, which can, in turn, soften the pain of what has been lost. One will never erase the other. Just help provide balance. We can get so focused on (and afraid of) the potential for bad, we end up hiding ourselves from the potential for a lot of good.
This holiday season marked one year since my husband had a medical emergency that put him in the ICU for two full weeks. It was, by far, the scariest time of my life, and I’ve spent a year in a desert war zone! Little did I expect to be so awash with the emotions that came my way over the last couple of months. It’s been a long time since I’ve had my ability to tolerate an emotional thunderstorm so stretched.
Even now, one of the people I care for most in the world is in a battle for her life, and I live too far away to be of any real assistance. There are more emotions than I can describe vying for my attention as a result of that circumstance alone. Still, I must be mindful that I’m here to do what God needs me to do in the place where I have been planted, and I need to reign in the expectations I have of myself.
As life continues to bring emotional thunderstorms our way, which it will because that’s what a broken world does, we will continue to lean on our faith and trust that the Son of God is just behind the clouds, ready to shine light on us again.
Love the Hand of God 