The Memories
Just a few memories from Christmas this year to carry me into the next…
- Watching figure skating with my parents and seeing Brian Boitano skate to “Rapper’s Delight”;
- Settling down to a new family tradition: playing Halo and Tetris on the ol’ Xbox;
- Enjoying a sickening amount of my parent’s bread and cinnamon rolls;
- Watching a special on the History Channel about the “Christmas Truce” of World War I (sadly, I think this might be impossible in this day and age);
- Standing in a circle with my family as we prayed before dinner and knowing that, despite our differences, despite how screwed up my life feels at times, these people form the web that surrounds and supports me.
I still feel that same sense of displacement and disappointment that I carried into the holiday season (and that I wrote about earlier). I’ve never been good at leaving my burdens at the door (to borrow some Christianspeak). This year, it’s been hard to let the spiritual aspects of Christmas, the ones that are implicit within my beliefs, to become tangible. And that also extends, past Christmas, into the past few months, which have been rocky at best.
Sometimes during Christmas, my family has a time of sharing where we talk about the past year. We talk about successes and failures, joyful times and sad times, and how we’ve tried to see God through it all. I’m glad we didn’t have that this year, because my turn would have been a long, awkward silence.
However, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve become content with struggling right now. If nothing else, the act of struggling implies progress, implies a sense of direction, implies that I’m still trying to hold my head above water.
As long I keep doing that, maybe I won’t sink too much farther.