Total Impact House

Holidays are supposed to be a time when everything comes together.

The weeks leading up to late December come with this belief that we can ascend past all struggles. We can make everything right, seemingly perfect.

The idea certainly isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t always work like that.

When things don’t exactly work out, people get mad. Really mad. Sometimes people get mad just trying to make the holidays fit that idyllic fantasy. Hearing about a person losing his life when others are determined to be the first to buy a gift has got to be the farthest thing from the “holiday spirit.”

There were no gift-related deaths this year and some of the big retail stores learned their lesson.

But a question remains. How do we make sure as individual people that something like that never happens again?

Perhaps that accident happened in the first place because we don’t exactly look at holidays the best way we can. Maybe we get selfish. Maybe on some level we only want great change for ourselves. It brings to mind an old biblical saying, “If I am not for myself who will be for me? And If I’m only for me what am I?”

Thinking and acting for yourself doesn’t make anyone a bad person. But if we get so narrow that we forget we have a strong ability to help those around us with simple acts, we might find ourselves without support if we need it.

There has to be balance somewhere. If nothing else, we can keep an eye for situations where we can help ourselves and others at the same time. Buying gifts from charitable organizations to give to your loved ones, whether during the holidays or not, is one really simple way to achieve that balance.

Purse of Hope set up shop at Total Attorneys toward the end of December to sell goods made by the women living in the Impact House. In just a couple hours over two days we raised almost double the money raised throughout the entire Hyde Park Jazz Fest.

Let us find the clarity to see chances where we can both help ourselves and others in need. And in doing so, we can show people we help that they can lend us a hand just the same.

Purse of Hope Booth at TA from Total Attorneys on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:59 pm by Benji Feldheim . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.