It’s that time of year when I could spend every hour of every day watching nothing but cheesy Christmas movies on Lifetime or Hallmark. My current favorite is a movie called Comfort and Joy.
Comfort and Joy is the story of a woman named Jane. She has it all. She’s wealthy. She’s successful, a vice-president at her company. She has an attractive boyfriend. But something is missing. On the way to a Christmas party, she wrecks her car and wakes up ten years in the future.
In this future life, Jane has given up her job, her boyfriend, her wealth and traded it all in for a husband, two adorable children and a church, where she is president of the Altar Guild. (I wasn’t aware one could be president of the Altar Guild, but good to know.)
She spends the rest of the movie trying to reconcile her old life with her new life and in the end, when her future husband claims to love both old and new Jane, she finally realizes the joy she could have in this new life.
It’s always at this part of the movie that I wish Jane could stay in the future, stay with her new family and live the life she was meant to live. But like most movies with this alternate life/time travel conceit, Jane’s visit to her other, better life comes to an end and she returns to her old shallow, vacant life.
Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan leave Narnia and return home through the wardrobe. Dorothy clicks her heels and returns to Kansas. In the end, no matter how great the fantasy, the hero of the story always returns home.
It frustrates me to no end.
But what I’m learning is that life isn’t about the destination, it’s not about where you end up, it’s about the journey.
In Comfort and Joy, Jane returns home so that she can live those ten years and grow those ten years and learn to live and love. She can’t simply fast forward to the end. It’s the journey that is so important.
It’s something that I have to remind myself of daily. It’s as if I see God in the distance and I want to race to Him and be there with Him in a heartbeat, but I know that the journey to Him is the most important thing I will ever do.
My mom and I have not celebrated a Christmas together in eighteen years. That’s a long story, but suffice it to say that at this point in my life it is distance, physical distance, that keeps us apart. But we still have our traditions.
Today the box of gifts she had sent me arrived. I called her and I went through the box and opened the gifts with her over the phone.
When she had asked me weeks ago what I wanted for Christmas, I told her to go nuts in the Christian bookstore.
And she did.
In particular, I was most moved by a cross that she sent me. It says on it “The Road of Ministry” and the writing on the cross says this, among other things, “Don’t run too fast, don’t walk too slow; but let God lead wherever you to.”
It’s the road. It’s the path.
It’s the journey.
