The Cares of the World

December 28th, 2007

It is easy around Christmas time to forget some of the cares of the world.  I get wrapped up in my family celebrations.  On Christmas Eve, I go to the Friends Meeting for carols and a candlelight Meeting for Worship.  Christmas day my family comes and shares presents and a meal I have cooked and plays words games to end the day.  This year was especially fun because I had a former CCW staff member over and then two foreign exchange journalism students came to meet my sister—the Washington Post reporter.

But the cares of the world still go on.  The assassination of Bhutto has brought that home only too clearly.

I spoke yesterday with a father of a young man who had always wanted to be a Navy Seal, but his knee was destroyed by the training.  He was dropped out of the Seal program and given an assignment on a ship where they tried to reconstruct his knee.  But it never got better and he got frustrated and finally he just went home.  He started a business and joined the Chamber of Commerce and got engaged.  He thought the cares of the world would pass him by.

But they didn’t.  He was arrested on a deserter warrant on Christmas Day.

I remember the Christmas right after my husband’s death in 1993.  He had died, not entirely unexpectedly, in October.  Christmas lights seemed far away.  My eight year old son desperately wanted everything to be the way it was before, so we went to Meeting for Worship on Christmas Eve, we opened presents on Christmas morning, we had the family over for Christmas dinner and we played word games afterwards.

The contrast between my grief and the hope and joy of Christmas seemed stark and ironic.  That is until Christmas morning and I looked at my sleeping son before I called him down to see what “Santa” had brought.  It was then I saw more clearly the hope and joy of Christmas and life is with us just as much as the cares of the world. 

We really can’t escape them, either.

May the New Year bring you a clearer connection with the hope and the joy of life and bring us all Peace on Earth.