Here I sit on Christmas day, feeling well-fed, lazy, and blessed. Instead of watching play-by-play coverage of the ongoing dumpster fire in Washington, DC, I have the Vince Guaraldi Trio on the stereo playing all the cuts from the Charlie Brown Christmas Songs. We fried a turkey, and it turned out to be the best one we’ve ever done. Yeah, I know, I always say that. But still…
I’m not sure why Christmas day feels like this, but it does. That mellow and reflective mood might be all about peace on earth and good will toward all men, or it might have something to do with all the turkey and Jamison. Either way, it’s pretty nice to spend a day just feeling good and thinking about the year gone by.
Back in November Kitty Donohoe, Reverend Robert Jones, and I spent a week writing songs with twenty teenage girls at Vista Maria. These young women are in foster care at Vista because their lives have been scarred by abuse, neglect, violence, and addiction in the outside world. Quite a few of them were trapped in the horror of modern slavery known as human trafficking. At the end of the week we all went “on stage” in a beautiful chapel on the Vista Maria campus and performed our work.
Then last Friday Kitty, Robert, and I went to Vista Maria to eat pizza and sing a few songs with our girls. We also surprised them with Christmas stockings that were put together by a friend’s church group. Each stocking was stuffed to the top with cookies, candy, gloves, holiday socks, and other wonders, topped off with the CD of their performance at the Lost Voices concert.
You might think that being around those kids is a sad thing. Anyone who knows me at all has seen me get emotional when I talk about them. But I can honestly tell you that those children are among the best things that have ever come into my life, and that’s precisely where all that emotion comes from. Watching the girls’ faces as they dug down into those Christmas stockings, catalogued their treasures, then traded gloves for Pringles and cookies for socks was exactly the same as watching my six year-old granddaughter. For that moment, all the shadows in their lives dissolved, and they were simply little girls.
Most of you reading this have raised or are raising children. Many of us have grandchildren. I can even squint hard and vaguely remember being a child myself. In any case, I think we can all agree that navigating the road from infant to adult is not always easy, even in the best of circumstances. So watching the courage of the kids I work with as they struggle to understand and cope with a version of the world that should never exist for anyone, especially a child, is a truly amazing thing.
Sitting here with my thoughts and my tiny snifter of Irish whiskey, I feel like I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. I have an amazing family, a wonderful home, and pretty much all the stuff a guy could want. And I am incredibly blessed to have those Lost Voices kids in my life.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
Thanks, Mike, for reminding us all (a) how blessed we are, (2) how difficult life is for some people, and (3) that the opportunity to help others, like those girls at Vista Maria, can be one of the greatest opportunities of our lives. If we hoard our blessings, we miss out on the best that God has to offer.
Thank you George, I couldn’t have said it better. The joy I feel when I see the faces of those kids when they hear their feelings launched into the world as music is nearly matched when I see the support from all the folks like you who have made this whole mission of ours possible. Happy New Year, George!