It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic Christmas movie. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it over the decades. The first time I remember watching it was as a teenager.
The message is simple yet profound—how would the world have been different if George Bailey committed suicide in the face of potential financial ruin? It’s a question we all might ask ourselves. How would the world be different if we hadn’t been born or, in another twist, if we had not lived up to our full potential? The lesson from the film is that the world would be all the much a poorer and darker place if we had not existed and if we’d not lived well.
To be honest, I haven’t watched it in recent years. Its message has been too painful for me to bear. I felt like I’d lost my way and wasn’t doing much to make a difference in the world around me. A very long story, but the bottom line was I really wasn’t sure how to spend the last phase of my career, what my legacy would look like and or how to leave a legacy that was authentically what I had to give to the world.
The past year, however, has been one where I have intentionally sought to uncover and strengthen my voice, to find out what I had to uniquely contribute and offer to the world. To explore what is it that only I can do and say given my passions, experiences, strengths and talents. It has been a year of growth as I write my book, write blogs, develop my own coaching and consultancy business and work for Thrive Worldwide, a start up company that provides health and well-being services to humanitarian aid workers and missionaries, one day a week as the Director for Research and Impact.
My main task for Thrive this year has been to write a definition of what it means to thrive and flourish. This overlaps with the book that I am writing about flourishing, which includes a politics of love and hope where what it means to flourish is to be active in the world, making a difference, loving one’s neighbors as oneself, whomever and wherever they might be. Human beings of all different religions, genders, sexual preferences, nationalities, ethnicities, ages and social classes, are our neighbors. We all are human beings, unique, worthy of dignity and respect. There is only one of each of us, which makes us individually unique and diverse, yet we share our universal common humanity.
This humanity flies in the face of the inhumanity that we see so often on the news. The hate that pits us against them, the hate that robs refugees and asylum seekers of their humanity, that robs people that are a different race than us of their human dignity as they suffer violence and discrimination because of the color of their skin. All human beings long to have a future and a hope and long to have a better future for their children and children’s children to grow up in. Yet, on both sides of the Pond, our politics are deadlocked and full of hate and fear for those who are different to us.
It may be that you’ve had series of set-backs, you have bitter regrets about having wasted your life or large swathes of it until now. One of the central messages of Christmas, regardless of whether you are Christian, atheist, secularist or whether you ascribe to a different religion, is that there’s always hope, there’s always a new day, a new opportunity to turn your life around, to make a difference, to matter, to love, to be part of a community. Christmas is about having hope amid darkness, about having meaning and significance in the world, even a world that is torn apart by hate, division, injustice and poverty.
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, another Christmas classic, captures this sentiment as well. Towards the end of his life, Scrooge is granted one more opportunity to turn his life. He has chosen work and money at the expense of family, friends and community. He is alone and even though he doesn’t realize it in the moment, he is isolated, lonely and bereft. He’s been given the gift of a visitation of three spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Future.
Christmas provides an opportunity for reflection. How are our lives going? Where are we at with our friends and family, our community? Scrooge wasn’t called to some big task, although some of us might be. He was called to love and be generous to the family and friends he’d neglected over the years in pursuit of financial gain. He came to the realization that money and material gain, status, and power were immaterial if he ended up alone and isolated from those around him. He was called to love through action, through generosity and compassion.
Are you lonely and isolated? Where are your potential communities? How can you reach out and love well? How can you be a light in the darkness, a beacon of hope in the darkness of the inhumanity that surrounds us. It only takes one candle to dent the darkness. Imagine you were given the gift Scrooge was, of his ghostly visitations. What is the ghost of Christmas past, present and future saying to you? What is your ‘onlyness’ in this world—-the thing only you can bring, that thing that if you don’t bring means the world, like in It’s a Wonderful Life, will be a darker place? It can be anything—nothing is too small or insignificant. What will be your next act of love?