December Holidaze

December started out with a bang and is going out with a sigh. It has been a completely packed month, filled with emotional highs and lows, hot and sunny days, cold and stormy nights, and of course, the usual holiday frenzy. When the month began I had just finished my November blog-a-thon and admittedly, I was pretty burned out at the challenge of posting everyday. I eased up on my blogging and tried to gear up for the holidays. Then, I encountered some personal challenges which knocked me to the ground. I can’t really blog about it since I am still processing what it all means, but let’s just say, it has forced me to look at things with a new lens. I thought I had a lot of my life figured out, but don’t you know, that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans? So, as I tried to work out all that this means for me, for my marriage and my family, I still had to get through the holidays.  “Get through” may have been the operative term. I struggled. Three Sundays in Advent passed without me “feeling it.” I wrote about it here. Processing my personal crisis dominated my thoughts and emotions, but with this process came a new perspective, and a word which I have come to understand and try to emobody…compassion.

I read in this blog that bloggers are trying to take on a word for 2011. I don’t know if I can be limited to one word for a whole year, or what it really means to take on that word, but if I have to take on a word for 2011, it will be compassion. I thought I understood its meaning and application to my life, but not until this month have I begun to grasp compassion. Compassion for my husband, my children, the human family, and myself.

It has been an  eventful month and it gives 2010 new significance in my life.  I know that 2011 will bring its share of challenges and joys, but I also know that facing each struggle with compassion will help me through it, and in fact grow from it. Happy New Year!