Christmas Present

Another Christmas Season has passed and we sit on the eve of a New Year.  What 2011 will bring us is still a mystery, but life has taught me that there is sure to be some beauty and there is sure to be some pain.  I'm ok with that.  Beauty and light can become mundane and taken for granted if not punctuated with darkness to contrast with it.  Imagine the people who live near the Grand Canyon...do you suppose they get up every morning and think "WOW that's amazing"!  Or perhaps do they occasionally think, "what a pain to have to drive all the way around this hole in the ground to get to the other side!"

For those living with grief and pain, there is the occasional beautiful moment that lifts us up and gives us hope and floods us with love.  With God's blessing, those times come frequently.   Sometimes it doesn't take much, because it is the contrast that makes the difference, right?  Everything is relative.  Remember High School chemistry?  Right, me neither.  But if you don't believe me, do this experiment.  Put your finger in a glass of icy water for a few minutes...cold right?  Now put the same finger in a glass of tap water...ahh, feels nice and warm.  But you know it is cool, don't you?  You just poured it from the sink.  It's all relative.  If your finger had started out at room temperature, you would have to heat the water to feel the warmth.

This was a rough holiday season for me, but yet filled with thousands of warm moments, so overall, it was a happy time.  I was surrounded by the love of friends and family.  I was reminded that it isn't the gifts, the money, the place, or the pageantry.  It is simply the people.  God lives in the people (and perhaps the puppies and kittens). 

But even surrounded with the love of Christmas Present, I longed also for Christmas Past.  Every Christmas Past was not perfect....some were lonely, some were poor, some were spent in foreign lands far from family, some were challenging....but for 21 precious years, all had Michaela.  As the holiday season started this year, I was overwhelmed with feelings of loss and loneliness, missing my baby girl.  But along the way, family arrived, friends stopped in, the phone rang, messages of joy and life were everywhere, and I received hope.  A few days before Christmas, a calm sense of waiting and knowing and peacefulness came over me.  And I knew Michaela was with us this year again.  I knew she would show herself, but I just didn't know when or how.

Finally, late Christmas night, the holiday over....the Christmas party cleaned up and everything put away.  Most of the guests gone home, a few of us sat down to play a board game.  Such a random little thing.  We seldom play board games here and we haven't played a single one since Michaela died.  It was something she liked to do the most and she would talk everyone else into it.  So I looked in the closet for a game and only one looked like any fun (Wise and Otherwise, the funnest game nobody has ever heard of).  The object of the game is basically to make up endings to 'wise, old sayings' from other cultures and try to get people to vote for yours as the real saying.  But in our house, the object has always seemed to be to get the most laughs possible regardless of winning or losing. 

I opened the box to play and there it was...Christmas Past was my Christmas Present.  The last time we had played this game was at Christmastime in 2007.  And in the box was all of the little slips of paper from that game.  A simple thing.  Doubters rejoice....of course these things will happen.  Nothing proven here.  But on Christmas night, after waiting patiently for 3 days for something to happen, I had my answer in the form of these little, funny, light-hearted slips of paper.  Nothing heavy, nothing to make me sad...just a small stack of tiny papers written  in her hand and with her crazy sense of humor to give me a few minutes of Christmas Past. 




Mich



Erin



Dave