I love traditions.
Growing up one of my favorite traditions was Christmas caroling every Christmas Eve with my family. We would all bundle up in coats, gloves and blankets galore, with milk jug candle lanterns to light our way. All nine cousins, parents and an aunt and uncle thrown in for good measure cramming into the back of my Uncle Wayne’s hideously ugly green truck affectionately named Bugger, singing at the top of our lungs until our little noses were purple from the cold.
It was miserable.
It was wonderful.
It was our tradition.
At least once a year someone threatens to re-institute it but then we think of all the work it will entail and since most of us are single without children, all in our 20s and 30s how silly would we look? Besides, Bugger has long been sold. But my brother and sister-in-law recently had their first child and I think maybe it’s time to start thinking about it.
To be able to pass down a tradition from one generation to another is a sweet gift of heritage. The ins and outs to what makes a family work. The ins and outs to what brings joy to a family that you can’t possibly try to explain to someone else without them experiencing it for themselves.
Yeah, I think it might be time.
The day after Christmas my moma would take us shopping to take advantage of the sales and the three of us kids would pick out one Christmas ornament we liked to add to our collection. My moma, brilliant as she is, did this so that we would have ornaments when one day we would have our own home to put a Christmas tree in.
My first Christmas on my own, this tradition not only served a practical purpose in adding decoration to a tree that was certain to rival Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, but it also brought a little bit of home to that shabby 538 square foot apartment in Orlando, Florida.
As I began to unpack some of those ornaments I just laughed…what a montage of memories made up of inanimate objects that hang on a tree.
Some tacky, some random, some ornate, and some sentimental.
All necessary for the tradition.
Like I said before, I love traditions but sometimes traditions can get us into trouble and cause more problems than they do joy. Sometimes they keep us trapped in the past when what we really need to do is bust into the present so we can burst wide open the future.
I’ll never forget the details of the day when I was confronted with one such tradition. I was sitting around a table with several older women one Thursday afternoon when one of the ladies, who was a good friend of my beloved, late grandmoma, asked me what I was going to do after I graduated from college.
That blessed event was coming up within a month or so and I already had plans.
Big plans.
Life changing plans.
I had gotten a job with Exodus International in Orlando, FL and my parents and I were going to move me a little over 400 miles south in just two short months.
I was so excited and terrified all at the same time. I had also never felt God’s smile on my life more profoundly. I knew this was by His leading and direction and with that knowledge brought a bold confidence.
“I don’t believe that is the right thing to do, Kathryn.”
It was like tires were screeching against my soul. What?
“I don’t believe it is God’s will for a woman to live alone. I believe it is God’s will for a woman to go from her father’s house to her husband’s house.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She wasn’t telling me that she had prayed specifically for God’s will for my life to be shown, she just believed that God’s will was the same for every woman who ever lived.
I’m sorry but I just do not believe that His will is the same for every one of us single ladies. Sounds more like a tradition to me.
For the purpose of full disclosure, if I could have chosen what would happen in my life, I would have chosen just what she described. I would have stayed at Moma and Daddy’s until I was 21 and then I would have married the man of my dreams and moved into the home he prepared for us. Fortunately, that is something I couldn’t choose because the guy I wanted at 21 turned out to be a putz, but I digress.
I went on to tell this concerned woman that my parents and I had prayed over this decision and all parties involved felt like this is what the Lord wanted us to do.
Would it be hard? Most definitely. Would I miss my family? Absolutely. Did I know exactly what to expect? No, but half of the fun in an adventure is the unknown.
She was not swayed by my explanation.
Years later, I find this tradition heartbreaking.
How many young women have ignored God’s calling on their lives in the middle of their singleness because they cannot live alone?
How many young women have squandered a time in their lives they will never again have?
I am so thankful that I still have the umbrella of protection that is provided by my daddy but as we have seen by my time in Orlando, I don’t have to live in his home to be under it.
And when I think about all the things I got to be apart of during those three years that I would have missed had I listened to her, it makes me pretty angry.
At what point does the will of God for someone’s life trump tradition?
