I’ve been thinking lately about how life has gotten a hold of me. I hate the feeling of not being in charge of what’s happening, but instead struggling to keep up. And what I hate most is just surviving life. What’s the point of that? I want to be passionate about the way I live my life. I want my actions to be actions of purpose. And I wonder how to get back to that point in my life?

One thing we’re doing right now is questioning the way we celebrate the upcoming holidays. When we first married EIGHT years ago we made the compromise to not celebrate Christmas in our home, but still participating in my parents’ celebrations. The first few years were excruciatingly hard for me as I had always loved Christmas. But as time passed, I started to see where Jim was coming from. I think now I’m at the point that it just doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. (Gasp! Can a Christian say that?) And I find myself in a good place: totally understanding why other people celebrate it and (finally) totally understanding why I don’t – and being OK with all of it.

Now that we feel pretty unified on the subject we need to come to a decision about what we teach our kids and how we handle it with them. I feel like we’re giving them totally mixed signals. Why do we go somewhere to celebrate something that we don’t think we should celebrate? How are they supposed to understand that we make choices for our family that most of the world doesn’t make? How are they supposed to understand that we’re not going to worry about the choices other people make? How do you teach your kids that WE believe something is wrong, but we have no problem with what other people choose to do?

(I think maybe that’s the fundamental question of life. One that I don’t see much of Christian culture being able to answer. I think it comes down to learning to truly accept people for who they are. Not tolerate them like one does a buzzing gnat, but accept them.)

But it’s such a hard thing to explain to a five year old who only sees the world in black and white. As an adult, I have a hard time answering the why’s about our choices. I feel like it can be such a loaded question and it’s hard to answer without people perceiving it as an attack on something precious to them. So how do we avoid miss black-and-white going to school and telling her friends that Santa is not real and that much of Christmas is based in pagan tradition? It’s like that time when she told one of my customers that we don’t celebrate Halloween because we don’t worship the devil. ooops.

I don’t want my kids to have wishy washy beliefs but I don’t want them bulldozing everyone in their path with said beliefs either. And I know, in the end, all was can do is teach them what we believe and then be prepared to accept whatever decisions they make as adults anyway.

So we have some decisions to make. Finding our own path on this has proven to be a lot harder than we anticipated. Learning to balance what’s important to our own immediate family with what’s important to each of our families is proving to be even harder. And the being in limbo while we’re trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do is the hardest for me – the person who has to have a plan to Fix. It. All.

More about my thoughts on this in the past here.