I Want To Live Again

It’s Christmas season.

and I don’t know about you, but my mother has the Hallmark Channel and Christmas movies playing around the clock. I don’t say “good morning mother, how did you sleep?” No. I wake up and yell through the house, “which movie is playing now!?” She is romantic robot. It’s unbelievable.

I had a long day today and came home. The usual Christmas movie was playing. I was eating my dinner alone at the table in the dining room/living room/bedroom (we live in a small house) and I noticed the movie that was playing was “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart. What a classic. When I was a little boy, the movie didn’t mean as much to me personally. You look forward to the action scenes or things that make you laugh. You miss the special moments that movies can bring, the wisdom and encouragement of whatever that would look like.

The main character, George Bailey, has dreams and ambitions he desires to go after full-heartedly. However, due to circumstances, he gives those things up to help his community. The people he knows and grew up beside. His friends. Then life gets him down. HARD. He becomes a shell of the agent of optimism he once was. Things begin going poorly in his life, and George is in a lot of trouble with the law due to financial debt, and his family is falling apart. George is strongly considering ending his own life to deliver himself from the bondage of his great hurt.

George is then visited by the angel Clarence, who grants George’s wish to never be born. As the movie goes on, George begins to see what would have happened if he had never lived, how the people whom he saved, protected, loved, and served would have had so many different and horrible endings. George begins to see that his life mattered. By the end of seeing how his wish turned out, he wanted nothing more than to go back! He, with such passion, utters the words, “I WANT TO LIVE AGAIN.”

He finds himself back in reality and has a new spirit filled with joy and kindness towards his fellow man. He runs all over his city, blessing people with his contagious zeal for life. He runs into his home and embraces his wife and children tightly. And then, character after character comes into his home to give him any money they might have to help deliver their friend from his debt—not because they had to but because they loved him. Deeply.

George opens up a “mysterious” book on the pile of money his friends are giving him, and on the first page is a note written by Clarence, the angel. It says,

“Dear George: Remember no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the wings! Love Clarence”

As I was watching this ending, I wept. Harder than I have cried in quite some time. I believe it hit home so deeply for me because it felt like my current reality. This last year was the loneliest, saddest, and most isolated years of my life. I reached a point mentally last spring where I genuinely didn’t desire to live anymore. I had many hard and lonely conversations with the Lord. It was real, and it was raw. I cried out to God, my heavenly Father, and I said, “Please help me!” The words in Psalm 18 say, “In my distress, I called upon the Lord; to my God, I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.” And what was the result? The Psalm later says, “...he rescued me, because he delighted in me.”

So how did God bring me out of my dark, lonely, sad and hurting reality? He did it through you, my friends! I have lived many many different places in this country and I have so many friends from a whole bunch of different periods of my life. It was you who called me and asked how I was doing. It was you who prayed for me. Who laughed with me. Who encouraged me. Who stood beside me and called me your friend.

It has been a process and still is developing. I am not the same person. Hardships and trials change us. It’s not bad its just different. But by God’s amazing grace, I like George Bailey can honestly say that I don’t want to “exist” I want to “LIVE AGAIN.”

Why? Because God almighty heard my cry and sent you, my friends, to help me.

Let’s you and I make this the greatest Christmas we have ever had. Not because of what we GET but because of what we can GIVE. Following the example set by God through His precious Son, Jesus Christ!

“No man is a failure who has friends.”

Merry CHRISTmas. You’re my friend.