A Letter to Me
Dear CC–
Christmas is literally upon us, and I wanted to take this time to remind you where your head needs to be during this holiday.
I understand that this has been quite a challenging year for you in many respects. I like to think of your life in various buckets: physical, spiritual, career, financial, marital, parental, relationship, and psyche. There may be others, but surely this is plenty. For so many of these categories, you seem to be struggling greatly. Marital is probably the healthiest of all these, no thanks to you as you’ve put Sweetie through quite a challenging year filled with uncertainty and unfulfilled potential. Parental might be ahead of marital as you’re generally a good father to those boys.
The other life buckets are byproducts of your general malaise, one that could be overlooked as a minor funk were it not so prolonged and such to the core of who you are and were. It makes cliches ring true, this life hiatus where entropy is the driving force in a being. To fix these things won’t be easy, and a sweeping set of New Year’s Resolution or a burst of energy won’t do the trick. No, this gets to the core of every facet of your life, yet it may be a singular swing thought that gets you through this valley.
I remember a pastor who addressed his congregation regarding the purpose of a worship service. “Some of you may be uncomfortable with the music we have now or details of my message,” he said.  “Remember this: our worship service isn’t for you and it isn’t for me. Worship is about praising our Lord, it is about Him.” I believe this is your problem, that too much of your life has become centered on an ain’t-it-bad self loathing, a life propped up by quick fixes with an infrastructure brittle and unstable. The center needs to move away from you and toward others.
In worship, this means that you need to stop judging everything around you and start reaching out, using what are called spiritual gifts to praise God and to come alive in your faith. For you, this means working with kids, teaching, and giving of yourself. You don’t know anyone at the mega-church you attend? Well, quit worrying about that, pray more, and start doing more. You can’t do your way into God’s grace; it’s one of the dangerous thing about this faith that you have. God has given his love to you with strings attached; you can’t be good enough or do enough to gain greater favor from Him. No, start doing so that you can put yourself aside and can start becoming the man that you once were.
Why do I tell you all this on Christmas Eve? Because your time with your family and Sweetie’s has again become a self-centered mess, one where you are more worried about the shortcomings of those people or how to avoid talking about your own problems than about simply loving those people. Whatever flaws and handicaps they bring to the table, the one thing each of them brings regardless of how they individually demonstrate it is an unending love for you. Don’t worry if you can’t live up to being the wacky one-liner guy, the successful high-potential who was too young for the jobs you held, the academic and athletic all-star of your youth. That may have defined you in your eyes, but it’s not how they’ve defined you. No, they’ve simply known you as their first born, their older brother, the husband of their daughter, their new older brother-in-law and good friend. And they’ve always loved you and have never wavered. You’ve always been a big gift giver, and if you were in therapy there would probably be some sort of reason for it. It’s never been about that.
So, when Sweetie gets back from the movie with her parents and the boys (except the Little Guy, who you’ve plopped in front of the cartoons so you can knock this out as well as pay off AQ as you raised with A-10 then bet a board of AAQJJ), when marshman arrives later today, when you head to Memphis to see your family, let’s put all the baggage and judgements and itemized records of each person’s flaws aside for just a week. And let’s take each hour, each minute, relishing these people who love you, CC. There’s nothing wrong with having life problems, and I admire you that you’ve kept things together with all these challenges.
But this Christmas, let’s take each interaction with these people in your life, these brothers and sisters and parents and children, each of them, and let’s invest in them. Invest your mind, invest your caring, invest your love. Is that the meaning of Christmas? Don’t worry about that, because if you can just move in that direction just a bit, you’ll benefit from it so much more than everyone else will. You don’t have to solve all your problems right now, figure everything out about those different life buckets. Just love those people who love you unconditionally or conditionally, don’t worry about any of that.
Merry Christmas. I love you, CC, and I’m here for you.
Your friend,
CC
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