COVID is really messing up a lot of plans for me. It threw a mega monkey wrench into my summer, preventing me from meeting my granddaughters for six weeks. It interfered with Thanksgiving (although my son and I had a very simple, low key holiday, just the two of us, which is a memory I will always cherish). Now the latest outbreak of the virus is threatening to undo all my Christmas plans.
Woe is me.
That's how I felt the other day when my kids and I had to face up to the realization that Christmas, like everything else since last March, is going to be very different this year.
But then I did a 180, and guess what? Woe is no longer me!
I had a little help from the Almighty (imagine that). While ruing my fate and licking my wounds the other day (as if I'm the only person in this world being kicked around by COVID), I found myself behind another believer at the dollar store. We had plenty of time to get to know each other, masks notwithstanding, since the line we were in snaked through two aisles and moved at about the same rate at which my nephew eats vegetables (he once looked aghast at his mother over a serving of broccoli, demanding to know why she expected him to eat that "tree").
All I know is that, after bemoaning the national plight with this smiling Christian sister, who started out a stranger but wound up a friend, I felt my own Christmas spirit ramping up quite a bit.
The following day again found me in a Christmas crowd. As I wended my way through the store (itself a miracle - with corona cases surging daily and restrictions being issued faster than the old woman who lived in a shoe could pass along hand-me-downs to her bulging tribe, isn't it a blessing we can still shop?), I kept hearing a cell phone ringing. It was always the same tone, a familiar one, but not my own. I found it odd that so many people had the same ring tone, and that no matter where I went in the store, everyone was getting calls using this same bell signal.
Then the light dawned, the same way it did once when I was driving in traffic and kept being disturbed by an ailing muffler. It took awhile, but I finally realized the reason the obnoxious sound wouldn't go away was because my own car was the one making all the racket!
Sure enough, I searched around in my cart, and hiding under a stray bag lay someone else's cell phone! I picked it up and apologized to the owner, who had been calling for 20 minutes, and we both had a good laugh about my "smack me brow with heel of hand" moment. Long story short, I held on to the errant device till she returned to the store to reclaim it. Of course, I had to give her a Christmas tract and well wishes.
Just another example of the Lord dumping opportunities to spread joy amidst the everyday reality of corona chaos.
Most of my 57 Christmases have been pretty joyful. Sure, some have been lackluster and a few even painful (it's tough to feel like celebrating when you're in the process of saying goodbye to loved ones or facing the breakup of a marriage), but what of it? Did God ever promise me every day would be an ice cream cake topped with pink frosting? Why should holidays be any exception?
The more I think about this, the more I like how the Whos in Dr. Seuss's classic tale handled the downsizing of their Christmas. You remember the story. The grumpy Grinch robbed them of all their
holiday trappings, but what he couldn't steal was their Christmas joy. They woke up singing, just as they had every other year, refusing to let the presence or absence of stuff dictate their peace of mind.
We could learn a lot from those colorful crooners. Rock on, Whos, and while you're at it, how 'bout replacing our Grinch-i-tude with your Who-titude, and making the latter as contagious as corona.
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