Growing up Christmas was always a special season in our house. It involved, for the most part, spending time with our extended family, which included four grandparents and one great-grandma, Alice. Alice was born in 1911, allowing her to have a front-row seat to The Great Depression. As a young adult, Alice watched her family and their farming business be affected by this season in United State’s history. She picked up habits that she would later carry on for the rest of her life, like saving wrapping paper and overstocking canned food.
Have you ever noticed that once someone goes through suffering, to any extreme, they always walk with a limp after? When we go through heartbreak, we walk into future relationships with lessons learned. When we go through losing a loved one, we learn to cherish the company of those we do have around us. When we go through seasons of nothing, we learn to savor everything.
What are you learning right now? What are the lessons you will carry forth after this season is over? Or maybe the better question becomes, what will you say when you talk about this time?
It can’t be just me feeling the weight of the decision that is before us today. The decision of how we will respond today to the circumstances that surround us. We can’t change them, though we probably wish we could. No, we can only change ourselves.
Right now at this very moment, we are writing history in real-time. We are creating material for how we remember the Spring of 2020 both in our hearts and in our history books. How do you want to look back at this time? How do you want to look back on your reactions during this season?
What do you want to say you did? What do you want to say you went to in times of boredom, in stress, and in the grief at the loss of what was normalcy? How will you decide to grow, here today, as a servant and a leader in the midst of all the unknowns? Because it’s in the midst of winter’s dirt and decay that spring is beginning to bloom on the Earth. It’s waking up. Are you?
Because we can just decide. That’s the beauty of being human. We are the creation that gets to decide how we react. We have been given the choice to choose today how we talk about yesterday, tomorrow. There’s a lot of things we can’t control now, but we can still control our responses and our reactions. We can still control what our minds feast on, what headlines we allow ourselves to read, and what we do in response to them.
The picture I cannot get out of my head is sitting on my front porch with my own grandchild in my lap. When he comes home from school, having just studied the Covid-19 pandemic, and he climbs on my lap and looks up with his grandfather’s blue eyes, and asks me about it. What am I going to be able to say to him? I wonder what will be the visible and maybe physical limps that he can see in my life, having gone through this time?
I get to choose today how I will talk about it with my grandkids, the same way my Grandma Alice talked about The Great Depression with us.
And so do you.
