Article December 20, 1993 Issue

Christmas presence

Joyce K. Marin

I Spoke to my mother right after Thanksgiving, the time when members of my family usually told one another what they "wanted for Christmas."

My mother asked me, "What do you want for Christmas?" and I couldn't answer her. I told her I'd have to get back to her. I had been spending much time in spiritual study, and it seemed unnatural for me to want anything material. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I didn't want any thing from her for Christmas. What I really wanted, what my heart yearned and ached for, was for all of the conflict in the family to be healed and for my husband and me to be accepted and loved by all our relatives.

While during the previous year my husband and I had shown others a lot of love and joy, there were times when we could have expressed God's love more consistently, particularly to family members. Certain family relationships appeared extremely strained. One of my husband's brothers had even moved to a new apartment and requested that the others in the family not tell us where he lived. My mother-in-law was not speaking to my husband, and my mother and sister seldom called me.

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