A guest post by Joy Kay, Holiday Relief in the Midst of Grief, at the blog Our Stories Gods Glory , describes the joy and challenge she is presently experiencing during the Holiday Season as the first since her mother died last spring.
As I read Kay’s moving essay it struck me how this is the first time in a long while that I am enjoying the Christmas Season.
In fact I have never experienced the type of peace and comfort that fills and surrounds me this Yuletide.
As a child Christmastime brought a hustle and bustle, that though filled with excitement, I now, nearly 40 years later, realize left me feeling unraveled and disjointed.
I grew up in rural North Carolina and attended college in the Research Triangle Park. Giving gifts served as a great pastime and one of the major ways we expressed our joy for Christmas.
The gifts did not cost that much, but the ability to purchase them and many, as my mother routinely did, I realized presented a blessing in which my husband and I could not partake during the first Christmas after we married.
With my husband in graduate school and I having lost my first job, we barely possessed enough money to drive home. We arrived to visit our parents and with no presents for them or ourselves.
It was a let down, for us and I realize for them too.
Our parents were not misers nor stingy people. But the idea that we had no money to purchase gifts left them somewhat surprised.
I did not tell them I had lost my job.
That first Christmas was the beginning of many wherein we had little money, as throughout the year.
Though I went on to find another job, the birth of our first child five years later pushed me home with all 3 of us living on my husband’s moonlighting salary.
The hustle and bustle of life in Boston from Thanksgiving to New Year’s possessed an excitement, not unlike that of my childhood in North Carolina, that bordered on madness.
It was insanity to me. We had no money and seeing others around me purchasing what I could not left me hulled out and dry.
We left Boston at the end of my husband’s training and moved west.
Our nearly two and a half decades in California have delivered much for which I am forever kneeling to than God.
And yet it is only now, with the entrance of our middle child into college and one fruitful semester under her belt as our eldest has completed her second semester of law exams and our youngest verges on adolescence that I joy has returned.
During the last 12 years though we have enjoyed prosperity, I have used December as a time to reflect.
I have purchased little if any Christmas presents emphasizing to our children that I work to demonstrate our love for them throughout the year.
Christmas time has become quiet time, a time to enter our home, turn off the phone, and give thanks for our good health, the gift of possessing a home with heat and food on our plates, and a family with whom to break bread not only on the day of Christ’s birth, but also throughout the year.
The hardships my husband and I underwent during his training when we often prayed to be able to insert our bank card and retrieve $10 will never leave me.
It was a time of difficulties, but of great lessons for which I am immensely thankful.
In November my husband asked our eldest what she wanted for her birthday. He informed me that she said, “I have all the material things I need.”
Another blessing for which I give thanks in light of the suffering so many in our nation and world are undergoing and with whom I empathize.
I recently read The Purpose of Prayer in the Modern World an article by Jeffrey Small, author of The Breath of God, where Small discusses and delineates the various types of prayers in which around the world people engage and the focus of these prayers.
While Eastern religious practices center on silence and reaching a state of mind as with meditation, Christian forms of prayer heavily influenced by the Western perspective on life emphasizes laying our requests before the Almighty.
As a practicing Muslim I began to consider what effect I might experience in abandoning my list of requests that I made each day to God and instead offered Thanks.
I converted to Islam over a decade ago not because it is a better religion.
If the Divine had wanted all peoples of the earth to practice one religion the world would not have a vast arena of methods and manners in and through which we can interface with God.
Islam, with its five daily prayer, has provided a mental and psychological stability that along with the medication I take enables me to cope with my depression, and renders me better able to function and serve my family.
The shift towards offering Thanks instead of petitioning God proved somewhat awkward as my list of petitions included my desires for others whom I personally knew and with whom I interacted–that God might help them through their chemotherapy treatment, assist and comfort husbands and wives undergoing divorces as well as shedding grace upon their children, helping people who have lost their jobs find new sources of income.
During the last six weeks of allowing myself to only giving thanks when offering du’a, I have often had to stop myself from saying, “Oh God, please or I ask you to… and return to “Thank you, oh God for…”
Raised a Christian in the southern United States I was taught, “Ask and you shall receive,” that it was our duty as faithful servants of God to ask with trust in God’s grace and favor.
I have and still fear that if I do not ask, I will not receive.
But in this I realize lives an even greater fear. That God, whom we all know and encounter by many and various names, does not know us and does not care.
God, our Creator, moves and breathes, interacts with us most intimately, is closer to us than our jugular vein.
With the outset of December I have met two incredible women, women who share some much in common with me and have expanded on a wonderful and loving friendship I have been blessed to experience during the last 15 years of my life.
Last Thursday we, all four of us, shared dinner at this wonderful restaurant. It was lovely, and peaceful. Being with three other women with whom I felt no need to explain or justify myself, and who instead offered up themselves and who they are in ways that illuminated greater understand I possess of myself.
Perhaps this is why Christmas has taken on a glow that I have never experienced or felt. It has been like a transfiguration, one that not only has left me changed unto myself, but has enables me to say with even more joy and fervor as I offer up du’a‘s of gratitude, “Thank you, O God for allowing me the ability to say, ‘Thank you.'”