The Letter I’d Like to Receive

The other day I wrote a post about how we are more connected than ever, yet many of us feel even more alone. In it, I mentioned greeting cards, especially around the Christmas holiday.

Every December, our mailbox filled with Christmas cards. Tucked inside many of them was something known as The Christmas Letter.

Most followed a familiar pattern. Someone graduated. Someone got married. A promotion. A new puppy. A wonderful vacation. The highlights of another year, wrapped up in a page or two.

People sometimes joked that Christmas letters only told the good parts. Nobody ever said, "Well, Uncle Bob was arrested again. This time he's going to be in jail for a couple of years. Mary Jo got knocked up by her worthless tattoo-artist boyfriend. The baby is due next month. The pickup was repossessed because we couldn't afford the payment and groceries. We decided to eat."

Lately I've wondered if we've simply changed the format.

Today, many of us write Christmas letters every day. We just call them social media. We post the promotion, the vacation, the beautiful dinner, the smiling family photo, the perfectly timed sunset. One carefully chosen moment becomes the story of an entire day.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating good things. We should.

But I find myself wondering about the letters I'd rather receive.

I'd rather hear that this was the year someone learned to ask for help. That a marriage survived a difficult season. That grief softened. That someone discovered they no longer needed to have all the answers. That an unexpected friendship changed everything.

Those are the stories that remind us we're not alone.

The older I get, the less interested I become in the accomplishments themselves. I'm more interested in how those accomplishments came about.

I’d like to know more about what you had to do to get it. That's the real story.

The letter I’d rather receive wouldn’t tell me what happened. It would tell me what changed.

It would answer these questions:

·       Who did you have to become in order to make that happen?

·       What did you have to say no to in order to say yes to this?

·       What almost made you give up or quit?

·       What surprised you?

·       Who helped you along the way?

·       What do you believe now that you didn’t believe before?

Those questions don’t just reveal achievements. They reveal people.