It's a wonderful life

It's easy to be George, but what if we chose to be Mary?

Maybe we made a huge mistake.

Michael has patiently listened to me ask this question many times the past few months since we sold our house of 10 years and bought a new house back in August.

Michael and I used to drive around this neighborhood on the very edge of Baton Rouge on date nights when we finished dinner too early to go home before the babysitter had put the kids to bed. We would drive down the wide, shady, winding streets and dream of one day having one of those big old houses with acre-plus yards and big trees and miles of community trails and little lakes all throughout.

The neighborhood is amazing.

The house is beautiful (or will be, when we’re done with it).

All the new space for our family of 8 (all the bathrooms!) is a dream come true.

But, like my favorite holiday movie couple, George and Mary Bailey, we bought a fixer-upper.

Nearly every bathroom, sink, or faucet in or around the house needed plumbing work. We’ll have to rip up a section of our driveway in the spring to fix a main drain line. We had to have roof work done for the 7+ leaks in the roof that the inspector didn’t find. We have found and dealt with a mold issue or three. We had to have very major, very messy interior foundation work done. We had to tear off the back porch off the house so that my master bedroom opens to a three-foot drop to the backyard. Three of the ACs and the dishwasher have broken since we moved in. Nearly every wall and ceiling in the house needed sheetrock work—and therefore paint (which we’re doing ourselves over time to save money). About half of the house needed new flooring because of the type of foundation work we needed to have done.

Oh, and there is an enormous, three-room basement that we found out the hard way floods just about every time we get a hard rain, and we still haven’t resolved 100% what to do about it. We just keep a shop vac on hand and watch the weather.

It’s been a lot. A lot of blessing and a lot of stress. I think we’re past the worst of it so far, but who knows?

Sometimes in life, you just don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. And if you did know Everything, it’d be more than our heart could handle all at once.

St. Faustina has a passage in her Diary where Jesus tells her (and I am paraphrasing) if she knew everything she needed to work on in herself all at once, she would “die of terror.”

That thought has always stuck with me for some reason. It’s so striking to think of the mercy and compassion He has for us. To see us for who we really are, right where we are, with all that we have left to learn or heal or work on or become aware of about ourselves…and to still be on fire with love for us. And He doesn’t turn away, or lost His patience, or roll His eyes at us.

We get tired of ourselves; He does not get tired of us. It’s so uncomfortable and so calming at the same time.

It is both-and, as Truth often is.

What a Savior we have.

Back to our wonderful fixer-upper and all this experience has been. I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I still would have bought this house if I’d known about all these problems we’re having to deal with—if I could look ahead and see how hard (and horribly expensive) it would all be.

I think so, but I don’t know for sure. I think we did what we discerned as best we could, and as prayerfully and objectively as we could, which what we knew and what we had.

And sometimes you have to leave it there.

“One day at a time.”

Michael keeps telling me that.

It’s so easy to give that advice, but so incredibly hard to live that out, day in and day out. But it’s good advice.

Do what God is asking of you in this moment, and leave the thought of all the rest to Him. - St. Jane de Chantal

I saw the movie It’s a Wonderful Life for the very first time just a couple of Christmases ago. I’ve watched it every year since then.

Throughout the movie, Mary Bailey is cheerful, hardworking, unselfish, positive, thrifty, grateful, and hopeful. She gives away her honeymoon money to the needy! She makes a cheerful home for years out of a dicrepit old house without complaining! She raises four kids and is her good (but grumpy) husband’s biggest cheerleader. What a woman!

George, however, while he’s a good man in his own right, secretly has been keeping a running tab of the road blocks and setbacks in his life. George begins the movie with a beautiful wife and young family, in a beautiful home that he and his wife have restored painstakingly over many years. He is well-respected in the town and runs a successful business. George is dealt a serious blow in the movie, however, and he becomes desperate and angry to the point of suicide. All those tough-luck times and setbacks in his life come screaming to the surface, and he ends up contemplating jumping off a bridge on a cold, snowy night, when Heaven (specifically St. Joseph, if you catch the conversation up there!) intervenes and the story really begins.

I always thought George was maybe a little dramatic.

I think that’s because people with your same patterns of vice often irritate you the most. I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself too sometimes. I sure have these past months with this new house. The Baileys have come to mind often.

I was talking to friend of mine very recently about the difficulties I’ve had with the house, and especially the complicated basement issue we’re dealing with, and she sympathetically snapped back with something that surprised me: “Well I thought you and Michael would get a break after all you’ve been through, but I guess not.”

She loves me so much—I felt her concern so deeply. Mike and I have been through some crazy-difficult things, from job insecurity to starting multiple businesses to Michael’s plane crash a couple years ago, but I realized that I had to choose to not agree with my friend that day.

To not feel sorry for myself anymore.

Because we can all fall in to the trap that George Bailey fell into for years—and nearly died of—or we can choose to be Mary Bailey.

We can choose to receive the good and the bad, the easy and hard, with trust.

Like another Mary we all know, who we are invited to walk with this Advent.

That young Mary didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she gave her fiat at the Annunciation. She just gave herself into the Lord’s care and trusted. Then she chose to receive His will for her in faith and hope, every day of her life, no matter what.

You know, we host sweet little Christmas pageants in our churches that make having a baby in a cave with only one’s husband to help feel all warm and cozy.

We have beautiful Renaissance paintings of a delightful Flight to Egypt, complete with picnics and sunshine.

We forget that Mary and Joseph and their Son most likely lived their whole lives on the edge of poverty, in a country occupied by harsh foreign rulers, with people whispering about them behind their backs.

Mary had a hard life—in ways we often forget to ponder in our hearts when Advent comes and we start the Christmas season parties and pageants and gift-buying.

Mary said yes with the kind of blind trust that is a witness and a gift to all of us. She didn’t know what she was getting into—either the joys or the swords that pierced her heart. But she would trust Him. She would keep her eyes on her Son every step of the way, and she wouldn’t question or despair—even at the Cross.

This Advent, I am walking with Mary, and praying with her too: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done unto me according to your word.”

I will also be making time this Advent to sit down with my precious, messy, blessed family—in the middle of all the construction and moving boxes and the half-painted walls—to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and eat popcorn and snuggle.

I am 100% certain I will have to shove 8 loads of laundry off the couch to make room to sit on it. And if it rained hard that day, we may have to reschedule so we can man the shop vac downstairs.

But goodness, I will make that time to receive the gifts of God all around me this Advent. I will put down my to-do list for an evening and enjoy what and who He is hoping every day I will notice and be blessed by.

I will enjoy my people and my blessings, and it will be an act of praise to my good, good Father.

Because He has promised me abundance, and healing, and a future full of hope, and “blessed is she who believed that what was spoken to her would be fulfilled” (Luke 1:45).

And because it’s a wonderful life He has given me.