Celebrate the positive

When it nears the end of the year, most of my focus goes towards Christmas. It’s an exciting and larger-than-life kind of event. But there’s also the aspect of December being the last month of the usually very tiring year.

At this time, I think about the closing year, how things went and what I’m hoping will be different next year.

Sometimes on particularly busy and stressful days, I think about how nice it would be if all the busyness of Christmas was caused by a desire to honor Jesus and not the frantic “keeping up with the Joneses” struggle.

I occasionally want to yell in frustration when I remember the resolutions that I committed to and never got around to, the habits I thought I could break at the beginning of the year but held on to for another year.

Those were some of the thoughts running through my mind as Christmas neared. But then things changed!

I was walking down a road with a friend, and I happened to glance down at the pavement.

“Hey,” I said. “Look at that.”

My friend replied, “Oh man, the municipality really does not care. That crack should have been filled ages ago. Good luck trying to get anyone to fix that pothole. I’m sure the cyclists have not enjoyed this.”

I started laughing. “No. Look. It’s a heart!”

“Oh!”

We both laughed over how the same thing could be seen in two vastly different ways.

My friend was right. It was a crack in the road. They should have fixed the hole. It would probably trip someone up. It probably already had.

But I was right, too. It was a heart.

I took that incident as a formula for reflecting on this year. And it goes like this:

People were unkind.

I failed.

Winter was cold.

I got sad.

Friends and family passed away or left.

That’s the pothole.

God was faithful.

I was loved.

I succeeded.

Summer was warm.

Jesus stayed with me.

I got to touch people’s lives.

That’s the heart.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this Christmas I’m looking at the heart, not the pothole. With eleven months of the year behind me, this December I’m going to celebrate the positive, the progress, the joy.