Life is a Gift

During this holiday season I am reminded that life is a gift – a wonderful gift. Waking up each morning I realize that it is a new day and I have been given this precious gift of life and the best part is I can choose to use this gift any way I want.

My first thoughts turn to gratitude in being alive and able to have another day to celebrate my life. Being grateful for each breath I take and each opportunity I will have to be the person I’m meant to be is the first thing I do each morning. And then I ask myself, “How will you live this day?”

Knowing that I’ve been given the opportunity to lead a life centered in Christ, my life should be an example of that gift. In what place to I stand when given the opportunity to choose how I live? Will it be in joy, in love, in compassion, and lovingkindness? Can I be the person I am called to be? Can I walk-the-walk reflecting the light of God to all I meet? Will I accept this gift in the manner in which it was given – with wholeness and holiness?

First I must learn to accept that everything I do is a reflection of God’s love for me. I have life so the Living God can have life. Over the past ten months my life has been a journey of renewal in many ways, but one has been the commitment to lose weight. Someone recently commented on the change in my appearance and I gave them my usual spill, that I took a look at myself and did not like what I saw. I told them it was a God thing. She looked at me and I went on to say that I told God, “If I live so you can live then we better lose this weight so we both can have fun and be healthy.” My friend blinked a couple of times and then said, “Beautiful; just beautiful.” Twenty-four pounds later, both God and I are happy, healthier, and enjoying the gift of life.

“This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” ~ Psalm 118:24

The Christmas Wish

Shawna was thirteen, overweight, and precocious, but she had a sweet heart and only one wish for Christmas. Shawna wanted a family. The oldest child in her foster home and the only African American made the odds of her being adopted by Christmas pretty slim. But that didn’t stop her from wishing it, even if it was the same wish year after year.

This year was going to be different, Shawna told herself; this year, the TV station was spotlighting her so that all the viewers could see what a great addition she would make to any family. Her foster mom had found a pretty red dress with a black sweater, black tights and black Mary Jane shoes with flat heels. At five foot two, she was already full size but she didn’t want to appear older than she was. She’d never get adopted that way, she was told.

The day came for her to be interviewed by the nice lady who anchored the news for the local TV station. She was pretty and smiled a lot and asked Shawna lots of questions. And while they walked around the Mall during the interview a camera followed them around. She asked and Shawna answered, but Shawn couldn’t remember what she asked later and when the actual interview was on TV, Shawna became embarrassed and walked out of the living room at her foster home.

Eleanor was sitting on the couch in the den watching her two children as they attempted to decorate the Christmas tree. She had managed to drag the box with the artificial tree down from the attic, and then she had stood it up in the corner of the den in front of the window as her children insisted. It was a beautiful tree at almost seven feet tall, and the fact that it came with the lights made decorating it that much easier. Carrying the box with all the ornaments had been harder for Eleanor as it was bulky and most of the ornaments were breakable. However, once the box was down the stairs her children eagerly began decorating the tree. Their goal was to get it done as fast as possible before their mother changed her mind as she had done the past three years.

The twins were nine years old; Jeremy and Janice. Handsome and beautiful children, both had blond hair and blue eyes, like their mother, Eleanor. They attended public school and enjoyed sharing the same fourth grade class at the school down the road. Now that they were on Christmas break, the twins spent all their time together and although writing a letter to Santa seemed a bit immature for nine year olds, their teacher had used it as a writing exercise the last day of school asking his students to write a paper describing one Christmas wish. Later the twins shared their letters with each other and realized that their Christmas wishes were the same – to be a family again.

After her children had gone to bed, Eleanor fixed herself a cup of hot tea and continued to sit on the couch staring at the twinkling lights. As she did her mind wandered to years past and other Christmas trees in her home when life was good and her family was whole. She saw her husband John kneeling on the floor holding the fresh fir tree trying to steady it while Eleanor directed him to lean it this way or that way. In the end it was always crooked but always perfect. And she could see their beautiful daughter Emily standing on the step stool placing the angel on the top of the tree. The oldest of their three children, it was Emily’s job to place the angel they had gotten when she was born on Christmas Day thirteen years ago.

And then Eleanor’s mind wandered to the present day and she focused her eyes searching for John and Emily. Expecting them to walk through the door just in from the store, it still took Eleanor by surprise when she realized this was not going to happen. Then she remembered over and over that horrible day when a drunk driver ran through a stop sign and crashed into John’s car killing both him and Emily who had insisted she go with her father to the store.

Shawna had thrown herself on her bed in the room she shared with two other girls and was crying her heart out when her foster mom came into the room. Putting her hand on Shawna’s back, she rubbed her gently comforting the young girl. Shawna knew that the things she said during the interview would make people laugh at her; that they would see her as crazy for thinking someone could love her or would want her as part of their family. Had she actually said she wanted a single mom? Did she really want a brother and sister? And did she say she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up because she liked to argue? She didn’t mean to say these things; they just came out when the nice lady interviewed her. But Shawna knew the truth. Who would want to adopt a thirteen year old black girl whose mother died of a drug overdose and whose father got drunk for the hundredth time and killed a man and his little girl?

Christmas Eve morning arrived. The twins came downstairs and found their mother asleep on the couch in the den. Most of the time their mother was fairly normal acting, but each year at this time of year she fell into a depression that they could do nothing to help her but tiptoe around her and stay to themselves. There were no presents under the tree which was not a surprise to the twins. Santa would come as he did each year even after the accident three years ago, and their grandparents would drive in from the country and bring gifts, but there were no presents from their mother. Jeremy and Janice looked at the beautiful tree and especially the angel on top and saw that it was glowing like a bright light bulb.

Eleanor heard the children come down the stairs and sat up stretching her arms high above her head. She had not meant to fall asleep on the couch again, but feeling the loss of her husband was more than she could bear. So she remained on the couch where she could bury her sadness under the crocheted afghan her mother had made her when she was a child. Eleanor looked at her precious twins and saw their faces glowing, a reflection of the light coming from the tree she thought. And then she looked at the tree, and she too saw the angel on top shining brightly. Made of straw and calico cotton, and without electric power, the angel’s glow was shining from within radiating out into the room.

Then the angel spoke to them saying, “Your family is whole; your Christmas wishes are granted.” And suddenly the glow from the angel spread throughout the room filling it with a brilliant blue and yellow light swirling and swirling around the family of three. And when the light went out, Eleanor found that she was holding her children in her arms clinging to them. And even odder, the television set was on. Eleanor didn’t remember turning the set on or leaving it on the night before. The three of them turned toward the TV set and saw a beautiful young girl being interviewed and making her Christmas wish to have a family. She was thirteen, talented, funny, and a good student. She was well-liked by her friends and respected by her teachers. She wanted a single mom and a brother and sister for Christmas – a family who would love her as she loved them back. Eleanor looked at her children and they looked at their mother whose eyes were twinkling with happiness along with her pink cheeks and a smile on her beautiful lips. And she said to her children, “Let’s go bring Shawna home.” To which they responded, “Let’s go be a family!”



Merry Christmas from the Shartle family:

Happy Birthday Mama

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday; born December 6, 1928, she would have been 81 if she were alive today. She was 63 when she died in 1991. Her favorite story to tell was sitting in the movie theater in Baton Rouge on Third Street with several of her girl friends who gathered to celebrate her 13th birthday, December 7, 1941, sixty-eight years ago. In the middle of the movie, that afternoon, the manager stopped the movie and told the audience that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Later President Roosevelt called that day, “A date which will live in infamy.”

For my mother, it did, as she never celebrated her birthday again without remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor the next day. In fact, what became even stranger was that we often made her birthday celebration a two-day event. She always felt cheated that they couldn’t finish the movie and so my father would make a special dinner for us or take my mother out to dinner on December 6th and then on December 7th we kids would bake and decorate a cake for her and give her presents. We hoped it would make up for her missing that birthday party in 1941.

It was a little thing and when you think about it now, kind of stupid for her to hold such a grudge, but you would have to understand this woman, my mother, who lived a charmed life as a child; pretty, smart, pampered, popular, and loved by all. Then once she became an adult and felt her life was not worth living, she spent the majority of it inside the bottle of cheap whiskey trying to will her life away. And we as her children along with our father who adored her used any mechanism we could find to bring the happy, healthy and whole Anna Marie back to life.

So if celebrating her birthday for two days worked, we did it. Not to say, we didn’t mourn the loss of so many Americans that fateful day, but saving our mother was more important at the time and so in honor of those men and women who lost their lives in the attack on Pearl Harbor, I say thank you for giving your lives for your country. And to my dear mother, I say Happy Birthday….the cake’s in the oven.