Jesus Christ Blog

One of the hardest things about the holidays is going through them without loved ones who have passed on. The pain cuts deeper this time of year. One way of dealing with this pain is to hold onto good memories. Repeat them to your children. Turn stories into memorial stones that can be told and retold, and passed on to other generations.

And there are other kinds of pain as well – pain from the loss of a not-so-loved one. Someone who may have caused pain in life and their absence is more the pain of what could have been – what should have been, but wasn’t. For those who feel they have been in any way a victim of abusive parents, gratitude is what is called for at this time.

Gratitude? Thank you for hurting me? Actually, it’s the only way out.

Whatever evil and lack these may have unleashed on the world, they took the gamble of life, brought you into existence, and perhaps did one or two other things toward sending you alive into the future. If we loathe our lives and ourselves, then we will loathe them — and if we loathe them we are loathing ourselves. If we stop the cycle, then what remains is what remains. Here we are, there they are (or were), and to be alive is something. A root gratitude for existing is necessary for anything Good to happen to anyone. At the end of a certain process, it is nearly inevitable. Not perhaps grounds for throwing a party, but sufficient to toast to their life.

So like Bob Cratchit toasting the hated Ebenezer Scrooge, much to the chagrin of his wife, we will reserve a place in our Christmas feast for those in our lives, present and past, who have hurt us and/or helped us, for they are all a part of who we are.

Gratitude is a healer. Let it heal your memories and yourself in the process.

“In everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)