Offering Grace and Unconditional Love to Family

Happy New Year to all our loyal followers, friends and new Growing Weisser readers!
We are hoping and praying that 2014 will bring many opportunities to offer grace and unconditional love to your family.
Our family’s holiday season was bittersweet this year. We experienced the sweetness of the holidays as we gathered with family and friends during the Christmas week enjoying wonderful conversation, celebration of the birth of Jesus, gift giving, carol singing, gingerbread house decorating, baking and lots of eating.
We then started the New Year with the bitter part of bittersweet as sadness invaded our family with the hardship of saying goodbye to my dad, as he passed away suddenly on January 4th. I am so grateful to God that I spent the extra time coordinating with my sister and mom this year to enable my dad to attend our Christmas day celebration. We had just recently helped him move into a Skilled Nursing facility and that meant it took more of an effort to coordinate his visit. We all pulled together and our beautiful Christmas celebration became his last time together with us as a family. Offering grace and unconditional love to my dad made this possible.

For almost 25 years, my dad had been absent from our family gatherings. When my brother, sister and I had the opportunity about 8 years ago to welcome him back into our lives, we jumped at the chance to rebuild our relationship with him. The circumstances that created the distance are not important. The desire to offer forgiveness, grace and love in spite of hurt and disappointment was a decision that we all made and it was one of the best decisions of our lives. We have had 8 years of making new memories and restoring our relationship with him. We have had good conversations and been able to learn more about his life.

So my encouragement to all of you is to do whatever it takes to forgive and love the difficult people in your family. You never know how much time you will have left to spend with them.

In the not too distant future, when my emotions are not so raw, I will write more of a tribute to my dad. But for now, my message is clear. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO RESTORE BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS!!!