I think my favorite Christmas memory was the year I realized how much I mean to the people in my life and how my life has intrinsic value.
It had been a rough year in college for me. I was piling responsibility after responsibility on my shoulders. Extra projects for school, signing on to sit on more and more executive boards of more and more organizations. I was overextending myself, and I was burning out quickly.
One day after a big fundraising event, one of my underlings had to bring the cash box to the bank. It was piled full of cash from our event, the main funding source for our outreach program. This underling was a charming girl, but she was flighty and, let’s face it… blond. She came running back to our organization room in a panic. She had misplaced the cash box. That was bad. I had already mailed out orders for supplies, using checks postdated after our event. Yikes! After a quick calculation, I realized that we would be about 600 dollars in the red, not counting the bank fees.
I felt like such a failure. I had promised so many people so many things. I had felt like Super Woman, solving people’s problems, doing good things for worthy causes. All of a sudden, my reputation as the best student leader on campus was going to disintegrate before my eyes. The scandal. The outrage. My failure would probably completely undo all of the new privileges the organizations had received from the school. Everything would probably revert back to the old system which included having to go through the accounting department for every single purchase. Ugh.
That evening I went back to my apartment in tears. I was desolate, and I felt so lonely. I wanted to end it all. It seemed the honorable thing to do. I stared at the bottle of sleeping pills with hopelessness wrapping my heart in pain. I closed my eyes and buried my head in my pillow, praying for sleep. My fitful slumber was interrupted by a knock on the door.
A woman stood in the hallway. She was bundled against the cold, but was stripping off her hat and gloves and scarf as she waited for me to open the door wider. Her face was warm and kind, crinkled with age and a lifetime of laughter. A halo of soft white hair glowed around her head, styled in an old-fashioned perm.
“Um. How may I help you?” I asked blearily, but still politely.
“I have a Christmas present for you from God,” she replied cheerily, with way too much energy for that time of the day.
Skeptically, I cocked an eyebrow, but I let her in anyway. I was too exhausted to argue with this woman. I didn’t have the energy for words. She followed me into my living room where I collapsed on my couch and draped a blanket around my shoulders like I was fighting off the flu. She sat across from me and waited.
“Okay. Explain yourself,” I demanded with very little force.
“Sure, Cheryl. You were thinking earlier this evening that it would be the best thing to take your own life, and I’m here to show you how wrong you are. Even if you made a mistake, you are still too valuable for this world to end it all because of a bad day,” she said.
“That’s what you say, but I don’t think I make much of a difference. Everyone would be better off without me,” I insisted.
“You want to see what the world would be like without you?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said, hoping it didn’t mean that she wanted me to go outside.
But we did go outside. We walked to the Student Union and went past the student organization offices, at least where those offices used to be. They were storage rooms now. The woman explained that because I wasn’t on campus, I wasn’t there to organize the groups to ask for office space from the university. The food pantry event that I had helped with earlier that year had never taken place because I wasn’t there to spur people to action, and people had gone hungry. And worst of all in my eyes, the student newspaper was full of typos and grammatical errors because I hadn’t been there to correct the mistakes before they went to print.
“Okay, so maybe I make a difference on campus. I can’t live here the rest of my life, though,” I said.
So we drove up north to my parents’ house. They were gone on vacation, but we went in through the garage. I stared at the photos on the wall. My brothers and my sister smiled back at me like they had before, at family reunions and graduations and holidays captured on film. But the pictures seemed to stop around the early ’90s.
“You were never born, so once your siblings left the house, your parents stopped going to reunions, stopped having a Christmas tree and a holiday party. No more kids in the house, so they didn’t care anymore. You weren’t there as the caboose of the family, born so much later than everyone else. Once the older kids were gone, there wasn’t any reason anymore. They moved away. Your mom grew so lonely. She never bothered to put down roots up here, so now she just follows your dad around as he chases after his restless whims.”
My heart started to ache. My mom had really come into her own in the last ten years. She had delighted in her ministry up there, enjoyed making new friends and making a difference. I hadn’t been there to encourage her.
The tears began to fall. I felt so separate, so lonely, but not because of the petty drama that had occurred earlier in the day, but because I felt so distant from my family. I missed them. I missed sharing their lives. I missed having a family to come home to. Seeing it all now without me, I crumbled inside as I realized how much that meant to me.
I learned that night that I don’t exist in a bubble. By living in this world and reaching out as much as I can to my fellow humans, to my family, I make a difference, but more than anything, I need to be living my life. I feel happiest when I’m alive and connected to people, and maybe, just maybe, my life can make a difference to other people.
I woke up the next morning with a plan. I had a plan for the day and a plan for my life. I called the businesses that I had mailed the orders to and explained what happened and cancelled the orders. I got to work planning another event to replace the funds.
As for my life, I knew that if I didn’t slow down, I would miss happiness. By rushing about and conquering the world, I put myself at too much risk to burn out, to fizzle out, to cease being effective. I knew I needed to find a clearer focus. From then on, I picked only the most worthy projects, only the most worthy organizations to spend my time on. I culled my friendship pool down to a few of the brightest stars in my life so I could give them more energy. Most of all, I devoted more time with my family, that group of people who will always be there, who are the touchstones of my life.
So my favorite Christmas memory didn’t have anything to do with decorations or presents or food. It was the best Christmas for me because it was the year when I figured out what life was really about. Maybe it was a dream, maybe she was my guardian angel, but I’m so glad for the experience.
