A "Show-Stopping" Christmas: Giving Yourself Some Grace This Year

Today brings us the very first post in this year's Season of Serenity series! I'm pleased to welcome Richella from Imparting Grace back to Serenity Now today. I always ask Richella to open the series up for me. Her wisdom, grace, and wit are a blessing to me, and I hope they will be to you too. Today's post spoke to my heart. Please help me welcome Richella to the blog!

********************************

Excited about the upcoming holiday season, I did what anyone with access to the internet would do. I began perusing my favorite blogs and Pinterest for great ideas. Almost immediately, my attention was captured by this headline: "How to Create Showstopping. . . ."

Honestly, I can't remember what that particular showstopping item was. Because almost as soon as I clicked over to read about it, I was filled with a sort of dread that left my heart thumping and my stomach hurting.

At the time, I simply left the computer. I got up and washed the dishes; I folded a load of laundry; I started preparations for dinner. And I felt like a failure. Not a single thing I was doing was showstopping, and my holiday preparations would be just the same.

Then, with a force that's hard to explain, the truth hit me:

Life isn't a show.

As we share our lives with one another via our various social media outlets, it's easy for us to lose sight of that fact. We stage and carefully edit our photos. We write catchy headlines and captions. Many times, we include the good stuff and leave out the bad. But life is full of unstaged and unedited scenes. Real life contains the bad as well as the good, the failures as well as the successes, the mediocre as well as the stunning.

That's okay, because it all counts. Sometimes we learn more from our failures than from our successes. We learn and grow as we struggle and wait. We may gain more from the daily grind than the yearly hoopla.



And sometimes the messes we make are a greater testimony to the truth than our carefully crafted  scenes could ever be. Because the truth is that God is at work. God is alive and full of love, and there's no need for us to try to impress Him--not during the holiday season or at any other time.

So this holiday season, I'm trying to leave my desires to create something show-stopping and enjoy real life. True, it's not always pretty, but if I have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart full of gratitude, I can tell it's pretty wonderful.

**************************
She pretty much hit the nail on the head, didn't she? Let's embrace those little messes that have a habit of popping up during the holidays...alongside all the wonderful. Thank you, Richella, for sharing your heart with us!

You'll find the link to this post, and all the others (as they go live) rounded in the series intro post. Please feel free to Pin, Tweet, Share, etc. I'd love for word to get out about this holiday series!

Tomorrow brings us a home decor inspired post...so be sure to check in!

If you enjoyed this post or found it helpful, I hope you'll click your "Pin It" button to add this post to Pinterest, or a +1 for Google+. And I always appreciate kind comments.