From all that we see and hear, this is supposed to be the happiest time of the year. What more could one wish for than festive decorations, tasty foods, holiday music, gatherings with family and friends, time off from work and from school and other blessings. From all that is associated with Christmas, we’re supposed to be happy!
Sad to say, a number of persons experience the Holiday Season as the most painful time of the year. This happens and grows as we reflect upon what we can’t have and/or what we are not now able to do. We miss loved ones who are no longer with us. Maybe during previous Christmas seasons, we had more money to spend than we now have.
When we are down in the dumps, the Lord invites us to bring our difficulty in being joyful to Him in prayer. As we do this, He enables us to experience and to respond to our connectedness to one another in Him. The love of Christ is the bond that holds us together with one another. In this setting, we can each grow in the awareness that we are loved here and now, as well as we were loved long ago and far away. A proactive way of responding to the holiday blues is to send thank you messages to others for the good things that we have received from them. As we start to send thank you messages to persons for their kindness, the spirit of gratitude grows within us. We become aware of others who have befriended us. Before we know it, we may find that we need to limit the number of expressions of gratitude that we can extend at one sitting. As a result of expressing thanks, the heaviness of our spirit becomes lightened.
We are set free to become proactive in reaching out to others. Along this line, I would invite us to consider the following. We might pray for the awareness of someone to whom we might reach out who is not expecting this. This might include persons in the following situations: persons with whom we have had a real falling out, individuals who are in the background in our daily lives, persons who are new to our area, in our school or where we work, those who have gotten in trouble with the law, individuals who are different from us in terms of educational background, level of income, marital status, hobbies, interests and skills and in other ways. You and I have it within ourselves to make someone else’s day and Christmas Season as we reach out in kindness to persons who are not expecting to hear from us.
As we take to heart how deeply others care about us here and now and work to express our gratitude to them for the generosity that we have received, and as we strive on the basis of prayer to reach out in kindness to persons who are not expecting to hear from us, we have the ingredients for making this Christmas Season the most upbeat one that we have ever experienced.
Sincerely yours in Christ,