I Get To

If you’re shopping you may hear the occasional, “I can’t wait until Christmas is over.” With the holiday season comes pressure. Seeking the perfect present. Wrapping the gifts just right. Setting an impeccable table. No wonder we feel stressed over the season. But what if we change how we think? What about instead of, I have to … say, I get to …?

Instead of I have to buy the perfect present, say I get to buy a present? Or, I have to go travel to see family, to I get to travel to see family?

This has been a tough year. Because of COVID, many people are alone during the holidays. Consider what they’d give to spend a few hours with family members they can’t get to. And wrapping presents? Some are struggling with their bills and can’t even afford the tiniest gift.

Getting the Picture?

Instead of I have to wrap this box perfectly, you say I can wrap this box. People lose the use of their hands due to accidents, amputations, or paralysis. Don’t you think they’d trade places with you in a heartbeat?

Instead of I have to set a perfect holiday table, you say I get to set a table for the holidays? If there’s food and clean drinking water at hand, you’ve among the luckiest people in the world.

Here’s a thought

Do not lose the original purpose of Christmas—the celebration of the arrival of the Messiah! Try to shake off the trappings of society’s materialism and press through to the beauty of simplicity.

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”
Luke 2:11 NIV.

Nothing changes until we change how we think. Let’s shake off the chaos by switching our focus. Let’s celebrate the “I get to’s” of the season.

Want to see how it all began?

Can a woman on the run find herself again?

Ladies of the Fire brought us to the late 1960s as we met the newly-widowed Lily-Rose Pembrick reeling as she fled Lincoln, Nebraska, with her children. Only taking the cash from the house safe and what she could get her hands on at the family bank, she left the recently-inherited and successful Pembrick Transportation company behind. Exhausted from driving all night, she stopped in Applegate, Ohio, and decided to start a new life on Norwood Street. There, she met Fiona Kasey, an African-American no-nonsense housekeeper/companion to an elderly white woman, and Sugar Bowersox, a Southern spitfire who has lost herself in motherhood.

Together, they enjoyed Lily-Rose’s backyard fire pit, where dreams were spoken and secrets revealed. As they embraced a kinship they never would have sought, Lily-Rose began thinking her past could finally be laid to rest—until someone ended up dead.