A Simple Paragraph to Help Me Through the Week


A dear, dear friend of mine lent me a book the other day. I was going to buy it for my Kindle(stay tuned for a review later in the week!) but I still love the feel of a book in hand.

Anyway, it's A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee. Some may not know that before being a politician, Mr. H was a pastor! I generally don't read any books with a religious undertone anymore. That's a story for another day. But I did enjoy this book, it was a quick read with heartwarming stories. One passage stood out more than anything else in the book, and I just have to share. In this chapter(each 'chapter' is really a short story) Mr. H. shares a Christmas in which the best gift of all was life and the love between him and his wife after she was sick. They had lived through a 'crisis' and were stronger. It fit my life right this minute perfectly:

"That Christmas we learned that God's greatest gift to us is not to remove us from crisis, but to walk through crisis with us. He does not do us a favor by taking us out of all the trials and tribulations of life, but strenthens us by giving us the grace to get through them and emerge on the other side having realized that what we thought we couldn't endure we in fact just did. How often do we ask for the gift of escape from a problem and instead it seems to escalate? "

It goes on to discuss the simplicity of Christmas, but what I took away from it was something so different. Something not God-centered and religious, because I don't know how to do that anymore. What I pulled from that one paragraph is simple: We will emerge on the other side of this happening in life, even though today I don't feel that possible yet. My family is a strong, Italian, true New York family that gets each other through everything. There is no escaping this time, but we will endure. Thanks Mr. H., I needed that pep talk today:)

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