Christmas

Good morning, God, and thanks for this new day in our lives. It's Christmas Eve, and Christmas comes tomorrow. It's a day that I love to experience every year because it's a day when we're supposed to be focused on love, peace, joy, and hope. It's a day that originally was about you "coming" to earth as a person to be some sort of savior, though since you're everywhere all the time, it doesn't seem to be all that necessary for you to have to come to earth to "save" us. You do that all the time just by being, it seems to me. We're the ones who tend to shut you out of our lives, and that could make us feel that we need an intercessor when dealing with you.

I think I love Christmas mostly because of the ways that people focus on each other rather than themselves. Of course, I realize that much of what people do for others does come with selfish motives, but all in all, during this time of the year people are willing to do more for their fellow human beings with less question than we're willing to do during the rest of the year. It gets our focus outside of ourselves and on others and their wants and needs, and gets us in a frame of mind that allows us to try to meet some of those wants and needs.

I often wonder what the world would be like if we could approach life and living and other people in that way, every day of the year. I think that Christmas acts as a wonderful reminder of what we're supposed to be like and how we're supposed to act, but the shame of it is that it's wrapped up in a day that's now more about commercialism and getting than it is about compassion and giving.

So what do we do about Christmas? How do we make it about love and hope and not so much about the presents? When I look under the tree I see a lot of presents, and it's just my wife and me--shouldn't we be able to have a simple Christmas with no presents at all, and still enjoy the day just as much? Or am I compensating too much for having had so many Christmases with very few gifts? Or am I over-analyzing, and we just found quite a few things that we simply wanted to give to each other? I know that they're not super-expensive gifts, just some things that we thought we would like. I don't want to think too much about something that shouldn't be thought about too much, like motives for gift-giving.

A reply:

Christmas is rather complicated, isn't it? It's about the story of a virgin birth many years ago that didn't even take place in December, combined with non-religious holidays having to do with the winter solstice, now about gifts and food more than about togetherness and love. The togetherness is still there for many, many people, yet it's somehow become less important than the gifts and the parties and such. While it is nice to see children get excited about getting gifts, for example, you do them a great disservice when you teach them to equate a day with such an important message to getting gifts that are, for the most part, unnecessary in their lives--they may be enjoyable things like toys and books, but the vast majority of the gifts that are given are completely unnecessary, when all is said and done.

But isn't that what often makes gifts so special--the fact that they're things that you want, but wouldn't necessarily buy for yourself, or couldn't buy for yourself? A gift should be about the recipient's wants and needs, not about just needs. There are times in our lives when there isn't enough money to satisfy many of the wants, and then it's important to focus on the needs. But all in all, a gift is a gift, and there shouldn't necessarily be a need to quantify its value or justify it.

The gift that I gave to you--the gift upon which Christmas is based--is the ability to hope and to love. That's what the holiday is about, and you can make it whatever you want. It can be just as valuable with a thousand gifts under the tree as it can with no gifts under the tree. The gifts are a beautiful reminder of how good we can feel when we put our minds on others and their wants and needs. My hope is that people remember how that feels and continue to focus on others for the rest of the year. Of course, I can't force them to do so, so most people simply get caught right back up in their own little rat races or dramas, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try!

The gift I gave to you is my love, and I ask you to pass it on, any way that you know how, all day, every day, if possible. It's yours to do with as you please, but remember that the more we share it, the more it grows. Your goal is to help it spread around the entire world and to become a part of every person on this planet. A world of human beings who all are focused on love would be a beautiful world indeed.

Family Ties

Good morning, God, and thank you for this new day that we all have to live through. It's full of possibility and potential, and I'm grateful that I have a chance to live through it and experience all that it has to offer. I'm in Colorado now, visiting my parents for a couple of days, spending some time with them for the holidays, and it's pretty enjoyable so far. It's been warm and rainy, though a cold front and a storm are in the process of moving in.

It's really fascinating to me to consider family ties. In my family, I could easily have rejected the ties--there was enough strife and enough anger and pressure and dysfunction that waling away from it and never looking back would have been a very logical act. But I didn't do it, mostly because I've always known in my heart that doing so would have been a mistake. And now that my parents are much older and life is much different for all of us, I do see just how silly--and destructive--that would have been. That said, though, I do recognize that I've spent much of my time living rather far away from them, not necessarily on purpose, but that has been the reality.

I think it's safe to say that it's pretty impossible even to define family to the satisfaction of everyone involved. There are the genetic ties, of course, but past that, there are so many ways that different families diverge in their ways of being and of treating each other that it would be useless to try to find universals in our ideas of family. And that's okay, I suppose--the important thing is for me to define family for myself and to decide how I'm going to interact with my family so that they know that I love them and that they have someone to count on, rather than focusing on what I can get from family--even though that, too, is very important.

A reply:

Family is a fascinating concept, and one that allows people to feel a bit of security in a world that's constantly changing and that offers very little in the way of consistency. Of course, your concepts of family are changing a lot in today's world, which leads many people to feel extremely insecure, for that one part of their lives that used to be consistent is not longer so--some people are just as afraid of the changes in their own concepts of family as they are of the changes going on in the world around them. These people suffer greatly, for the refuge that they could and should be able to count on is not at all available to them. Having to go through life without any sort of safety net is truly a daunting task.

You've been right to keep the ties to your family strong, though you've also been fortunate that your family is one with which you can do so. And I would challenge your assertions about family and ask you to reconsider them as ties to your parents, for your ties to your siblings aren't nearly as strong. And you know why. Your siblings bring you down, while your parents don't do so. And you know that you can do nothing personally to change your siblings' situations or relationships to life, so maintaining strong ties with them would be extremely frustrating and possibly damaging to you and to the people in your new family.

It is a very good thing that you've maintained a strong relationship with your parents, and it's obvious that you'll continue to do so. This relationship will be something that helps you out in difficult times and that allows you to give to others in the form of being there for them, and giving them something to be proud of in their own ways. You'll constantly have to decide whether or not to strengthen your ties with your siblings, and that decision will be based on whether you can handle doing so, and whether the relationship will be balanced or imbalanced, healthy or damaging. Follow your heart.

Liars and Deceivers

Good morning, God, and thank you for today--we have a new day to make our ways through, with many new possibilities to explore and people to meet. Life is going on and on, and we're making our ways to the end of the year and the beginning of a new year--a year that I have to say doesn't fill me with hope and enthusiasm, given the fundamental changes that we're going to see, as well as the conflict and anger and frustration that are going to become part of so many people's lives in the near future.

I have to say that I don't understand how many people can see the lies and the manipulation that our president-elect is saying and practicing, yet still support him. It's frightening. They seem to feel that anything is okay as long as it fulfills their personal agendas--to the point of electing a leader who can't be trusted. At all. Not with anything he says or anything he does. I'm incredibly disappointed that this man has been made president, and I'm very fearful of what he's going to do to the people of this country. Now more than ever, we need your help, it seems.

Of course, I can't let the fear control me or dominate my life. I have to do the best I can to make sure that within my sphere of influence, things stay as stable and reliable as possible. But it is very difficult to watch other people support wrong, and to be unable to do anything about it.

A reply:

It's going to be a difficult time for very many people. Many people will become disenfranchised, alienated, threatened, fearful, angry, hopeless. Many others will learn from the status quo that it's okay to lie, that the ends justify the means. In some cases, it will become hard to hold people to high standards of honesty and integrity when their primary model of these two qualities shows little to none of either in his life.

Your focus, though, must be on what you can do to make things more positive for yourself and for the other people in your life--your family and students and friends and acquaintances. Even for strangers whom you've never met before. Enjoy their company, help them out, model the integrity and honesty that you feel should be the norm.

And be aware. Whenever this type of change occurs, there are other changes that happen, too. More people become concerned and are willing to step out and take action on issues that before, they would have been glad to leave to someone else. More people are often willing to speak out for the good when more people are speaking out for the bad. People pull together in ways that they hadn't before, because they feel that the stakes are higher and they feel the threat of being personally affected by the negative new paradigms. There will be new groups formed and old groups will strengthen, and these groups will fight for social good, the good of all. Join them or support them.

The sun will come up again tomorrow no matter who is in which office. It's easy to say that this sounds defeatist, but it's not. It's stating a simple fact. And what you do with your life and your resources still is up to you. Have faith--in me, in yourself, in your fellow people. Things will be okay, even though there will have to be conflict in order to make sure of that. There will be hard times, and there will be times when it seems that hope is lost--don't let those times get the best of you. It really is all up to you. Hang in there, and do good. And keep the faith. The liars and the deceivers always have their downfall, and they usually bring it about themselves.