As I write this, it’s the 4th day of the season of Christmas on the Christian calendar, or the 28th of December, in the way we humans calculate things. Our house is still festooned in lights, with a wreath on the door and Christmas cards from friends displayed on the mantle. Our refrigerator is still full of leftovers from the meals shared with family and friends.
Growing up as I did in a low-church household, where we did not celebrate any but the first day of Christmas, or December 25th, we took all our decorations down on the 1st of January – an arbitrary date determined by the calendar we got from the bank that held our mortgage. My Catholic friends took theirs down six days later, on the 12th Day of Christmas, or the celebration of Epiphany.
We had another friend who was a bit lazy, who usually took his lights down sometime in March, after his wife had yelled at him about it.
Regardless of how we mark time, eventually, the lights come down, the decorations are packed away, and we move from this time of feasting and rest back to the so-called “normal” rhythm of work.
It is popular for people to examine their lives during this slower period of the year and to choose new ways they want to show up in the year to come. Maybe this is the year you want to have a healthier relationship with food, or want to learn how to paint, or desire to pick up an exercise habit. It’s a natural time of introspection over the year that has passed: What worked, what didn’t, and what should we let go of, and what should we do more of?
This is natural, and in and of itself, there is nothing wrong with New Year’s Resolutions, and this is as good a time as any. We must constantly change and adapt. But it is very easy to slip from thinking, “I want to change this thing I do” into “If I do this thing, I will be more deserving of love.”
And that is not true.
You need not do anything to deserve to be loved. You are loveable as you are, right now. You are valuable as you are, right now. You are loved by God as you are, right now.
You matter because you exist.
God delights in your existence. There is nothing you can do, no change you can make, no habit you can pick up, that will make God love you more.
It may be that you need to change things in order to be healthy, in order to enjoy life more, in order to have more money or to reach goals you may have. But none of that is necessary for you to be valuable, or to be more loveable, or to matter to God.
And if you find yourself surrounded by people who do not believe that, people to whom you will only be acceptable if you change the way you look or the way your body is shaped, who can only love you if you meet their criterion for productivity, who have their own dreams for how you show up in the world – Well, may I humbly suggest that one place to start to change is to find a new group of people to surround yourself with?