Wait a minute, Mr. Postman!

If you are like me, you love to get Christmas cards. In fact, at this time of the year, next to writing them, I enjoy going to the mailbox to see who has sent me one back! Yesterday I was reading the Sunday comics and saw a cartoon from Lynne Johnson's "For Better or Worse" strip. In it, young Lizzie asked her mom about Christmas cards and the reply was "if I don't get one back from someone I sent one to, I cross their name off my list for next year."

Hmmm......do you do that?

Why?

I mean, there may be extenuating circumstances in which the recipient either didn't have time...or maybe finances were too tight to mail one out...or...any number of reasons! To just cut someone out of your life like that....? Is that fair? A friend of mine did that to me one year...no card. I fussed and fumed. I hadn't heard from her in a long time and thought maybe she had become ungrateful...or snobby! Yeah, that was it! She was too good for me! Hmph! I'll just not mail her one next year, see if she likes it! As it turned out, though, I only had to wait four more months. I bumped into a mutual friend of ours who asked me if I had heard the news...about her? "uh...nooooooo..." I replied, wondering what the juicy gossip was about. "Her son committed suicide last year....and she has been depressed about it ever since. They didn't celebrate Christmas...it was just too hard. Why go through the motions, right? I thought you knew..."

Wow...egg on MY face here! 

"When I didn't hear from her at Christmas, I called to see what was up..." my friend continued while the rest of her words went unheard...because I was wallowing in humiliation. My friend called her to see what was up, while I had taken it personally and decided to one up her...not thinking that maybe tragedy had struck. How selfish! 

Well...moral of this story is: don't be so presumptuous that you feel you know it all. If you don't hear from someone, instead of writing them off, find out how things are. In our society, it seems that though we are more connected than ever before, through Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn among others, we are more ISOLATED than ever before! To truly "love thy neighbor" maybe it's a good idea to see what is happening in their world. Our world is just not that important that we need to cut ourselves off from someone who may truly need to have a shoulder to lean on...

Just something to think about this Christmas...the season of giving!