'Tis the Season {to be Honest & Messy}

It's the holidays. That brings a multitude of emotions to the table, depending on your circumstances. But one thing, I have found, is pretty consistent: Our ability to put on a smile simply because it is the holidays, regardless of the storm that's brewing underneath.

We pretend we have it all together. We pretend our circumstances are better than they really are because we all want that great time of celebration just like we see in the movies and on TV.

If you know me, you know I'm not a fan of this...especially as of late. I'm pretty much over pretending and want to encourage others to create a culture of honesty and transparency. A culture where the perfect Christmas means a bunch of broken people coming together and being filled with joy because of what their brokenness means, instead of pretending to be filled with joy in spite of it.

What a better time of year to celebrate how messed up we all are? The whole point of the Christmas celebration is that a Savior had to come save our messed up lives, so why not embrace that?

Journey to Joyful...

Confession: I have not been joyful.

Sure, I'm usually pretty peppy. But joyful - the deep down kind of joyful that swells inside of you from a place you didn't know you had - I lost that somewhere along the way.

My joy became shallow. It was affected by my circumstances. I let my daily life infect my joy when it should have been the other way around.

I knew it had to change. So I started hunting.