Blessing

This will be known as the Christmas to look at self-preserving boundaries.

Every year for many years now, we have found a family to be a blessing to.  It started as something smaller.  And we have grown this Christmas blessing over the years.  Last year we had the pleasure of helping a family have Christmas, who wouldn’t have had presents and Christmas dinner otherwise.

That one really meant a lot to me.  Every year I think back to the year when my mom, brother, and I were adopted by a local church for Christmas.  I’ve told the story before in my blog.  Because my mom opened the door with a shotgun!  🙂  Ha!  I still love that!  I will never stop being amused by that!  And of course, it is funnier because she is such a little mommy (under 5 feet tall)!  Strange cars pulled up in front of the house, on our country gravel road, in the dark, when she was home with her two small children.  Now, as an adult, I know I would absolutely have done the same thing I were in her shoes for sure!  But, since it was her, and not me; and since it was nice people from the church with two cars full of gifts and food that she pointed the shotgun at . . . well, it’s just always going to make me laugh!

Anyway, I really liked helping the family last year.  This year we were going to adopt multiple families.  But it just hasn’t worked out that way.

This Christmas season we have found other ways to be a blessing to others.  Some really cool ways, that have been lots of fun!  I thought about still trying to adopt a family today.  But I am really trying to work on boundaries with myself; so I don’t keep running myself in to the ground.  The Bible says that “God loves a cheerful giver”.  And if I were to sleep four hours tonight to get everything done that I need to get done and try and squeeze in time to adopt a family, well I wouldn’t be cheerful.

We had a family meeting tonight and discussed other ways we can still be a Christmas blessing to others.  We will do those things.  And not just for Christmas, but all year long!

Tonight I am thankful that while being a blessing to others is important; it is also important to be a blessing to myself.  This Christmas I give myself the gift of contentment for the things that I have been able to do and contentment in intentionally giving myself grace for the things that didn’t get done.