What Have I To Give?

This is the season of giving gifts. Some of the gifts are simple and handmade, while others are more extravagant. Regardless of the price tag attached to each gift, I know how important it is to feel as though you have something to offer to those around you. There is nothing I enjoy more Christmas morning than watching the look on the faces of my family as they open their presents. It feels good to be able to offer something that brings so much joy.



Beyond the Christmas season, with consumer messages and rushing around to find the perfect gift, it is still important to feel like you have something to offer. Every year when I return to work, I am constantly amazed that I am welcomed back with open arms and opens hearts. I return to work after I have finished another year of university and I feel empty. I don't think that I have anything to offer to those who I live with and work for. Somehow they find that I do. When I am incapable of seeing that, they are.



In every relationship I begin, be it a friendship or a romantic relationship, I am amazed that there is someone who sees in me something that I can offer to them. I don't feel as though I do very much for other people. It's been easy to not realize that I do things for other people because they just accept that that is how I am. Since high school I have been the soccer mom, a role that is so far reaching in scope. I bake cookies and meals for people when they don't have the time to. I am the shoulder to cry on and the one people seem to come to for advice. I edit papers, I make sure assignments are handed in on time, I make sure that my friends are where they are supposed to be. I do a lot of little things that I don't see as adding up to much. I wish I thought they did, but I don't.



I don't have a lot to offer anyone in this season of gifts. As a student and a musician, I don't have a lot of money to offer to anyone. I don't have a lot of free time in my life, but I am working on that. I should have more in the coming year. I'm not at work as often as I should be, I'm not home as much as my parents want me to be, I don't volunteer as often as I should. There is so little that I do and I wish it was more. It's hard to want to offer things when they are things that you simply don't have.



In the season of offering whatever it is that you have to offer, both to those around you and to the Saviour whose birth we celebrate in this season, I know that I don't think I have much. There is one thing that I do have to offer and that is my heart.



It's not a perfect heart. It has been broken in the past and there are a few pieces missing. My heart does hurt often for those I love and those who I don't know, but whose suffering I cannot ease in the world. It is a soft heart that does ache and cry a lot. It feels so much, but it always available for someone new to walk into. There will always be space in my heart to love another person who needs someone to care for them. That can be as simple as having someone call to check up on them every once in awhile. It can be as complicated as finding the person to spend the rest of your life with.



For all of the faults my heart has, it is the one gift I have to give. And I will always be ready to give it to those who need it.