Christmas cards and, well, no Christmas cards

This year, there will be no Christmas card.  Last year, I sent a smiling picture from the sun of Arizona.  The year before that, a gentle, calm, festive picture of my older children gazing lovingly at the new baby.  

But this year, please don’t check your mailbox for a card from me.  You won’t get  it.  I can’t think of a way to summarize the closing year in a photo.  And I won’t be able to bring myself to bribe my kids to “SMILE!” all at once, keeping it up until the shutter closes on a slice of perceived reality.  

Because this year, 2015, has been the hardest year of my life.  And this, it seems, is likely to create a bit of “ooh what’s the matter” reaction.  Maybe it is somehow easier to see our own lives as put together when we understand that someone else’s isn’t.  

Well, let me be the first to tell you that my clutter free, straightened, candle burning, calm music playing welcoming home is but my way of dealing with the painful clutter we are dealing with.  When constant and chronic pain make a visit to the person you love the most in this world, things seem to shatter.  Pain, though shared by so many,  is somehow lonely.  

This isn’t a pity party over here.  I don’t see myself as any different than the next person, with any more suffering than the lady at the checkout counter, and with any more bad luck or exhaustion than the man who delivered me that package this morning.  

Unfortunately, the pain that is in my life is not uncommon.  

Instead, it is threatened by so much suffering on a completely deeper and more intense level.

You see, my dear friend was caught at the front of the recent shooting in California, where a coworker shot her, along with her coworkers and friends, killing 14 people.  One of them was a father of 6 beautiful children.  All of them were precious, loved, and someone’s child.  Her suffering is so massive it almost makes me stop breathing just thinking about it.  And I am thousands of kilometers away.  

Basically, this world is too much.  

It seems that over time more and more certainty is stripped away.  Certainty about this world.  Assurance of what is out there.  Knowledge of what is to come.  Understanding of who is to blame and who is to credit.  

The certainty seems to blur, to fade, and to say a polite “au revoir.”

And it leaves me a little stunned.  But maybe also a little relieved, pulling on the strings of peace.  

What is it that drives us to get up each day, to love the people around us, and to try and try again to show it?

There’s gotta be something.  

So I throw in the towel and say what the heck, what the hell, what in heaven’s sake is wrong with this world?

And just trust in not knowing and not understanding and not really being sure of much.  

Except that love exists, that care pulls us together.  And that Someone must be the origin and the future.  Please may that be true. 

And dancing with your daughter as the sun shines through the clouds is really all you can do.

But do check your mailboxes next year.  I’m hoping to be back at it.