When life feels broken at Christmas.

Christmas can be “the most wonderful time of the year,” but the holidays can also have a way of making life’s regrets, struggles and brokenness seem even bigger. Maybe this Christmas you’re finding yourself in a difficult place. You look around at your life and you’re overwhelmed with frustration and disappointment about how things are turning out. You feel like every happy Christmas song is rubbing salt into the wounds of your heart.

If any of that sounds familiar to you, I want to share a quick story that completely changed my perspective and perhaps it can change yours too.

Please take a minute to watch this short video on life’s broken pieces at Christmas that I made with my family. My wife Ashley and our kids help tell this story. (Photo above courtesy of www.Shutterstock.com)

A couple years ago my family and I were braving the Christmas Craziness at Walmart when my kids passed a display of gingerbread houses and started begging, “Daddy, PLEASE, PLEASE can we get a gingerbread house?”

My mind started drifting to the magical holiday memories we’d make together sitting around the table sipping hot cocoa while making the world’s most perfect gingerbread house. It would look just as perfect as the one on the box. I gave in and pulled out the eight bucks to buy it and we headed home to make some Christmas magic.

On the way home, the boys started fighting over the gingerbread house box in the back of the van. By the time we got home and opened up the box, all that was left inside were broken pieces. I was so frustrated! My perfect plan was as broken as the pieces of that gingerbread house. I went to throw the whole box in the trash, when my wife stopped me and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to throw this thing away! It’s broken! It’s never going to look like the picture on the box!”

She smiled and replied with such patience and wisdom, “It doesn’t have to look like the picture on the box.”

She took the box from my hands and placed it on the table and pulled out all those broken pieces and we started making oddly-shaped-but-beautiful gingerbread cookies. We laughed and had more fun together that night than we’d had in a long time, and I almost missed it, because I was going to let frustration get the best of me.

Here’s the point of the story…maybe your life feels like the broken pieces of that gingerbread house. You had a picture in your mind of how life was going to turn out, but now your life will never look like the “picture on the box,” but here’s the good news…it doesn’t have to! I truly believe God can take the broken pieces of our lives and create something even more beautiful than we ever could have created on our own. Trust Him with with your broken pieces this Christmas, and you’ll be amazed what He can create with them!

“For I know the plans I have for you declares the LORD; plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

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