'Tis the Season of Joy, But What If It's Not? It's Time I'm Honest About Our Year.

Note to Self: Joy and Pain Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Happy December and Merry Christmas!!

I can’t believe it’s already Christmas time. I LOOOVE this season. Being out and about, hearing the music, seeing all the lights, gathering intentionally with friends and family, I love it all.

BUT…For those whom this season brings sadness.

I See You!

Maybe you lost someone dear to you.

Two special people in my life, my mom and college roommate, both lost their mothers this year. With each passing milestone or special day this year, I can imagine their pain being slightly reignited feeling the loss in the memories but somewhat relieved as the days pass and they make it through.

I see you.

Maybe you lost your job and are wondering how life is going to look.

Not so incidentally, this happened to us and we’re still in the thick of dealing with it as you will read below.

I see you.

Maybe a relationship that you had full faith in has fallen apart or any number of other things haven’t gone like you thought.

I see you.

AND I’ve learned something this year; joy and pain are not mutually exclusive.

If You’re New to Real Food Sanity, Welcome…This Post is a Bit Different

I probably should have saved this post for Christmas week, but it felt necessary today. My Monday posts are typically stories about the connection between people and food as well as resources to give you recipes, tips, etc. to make “Life at the Table” happen at your house. This week is certainly a resource, but more for the spirit than the body.

I’ve got lots of great resources coming, so here’s a little taste of what you can expect in your inbox*:

• Holiday appetizer and dessert recipes

• My Journey as a Certified Whole30 Coach (It’s Probably Not What You Think) with a 5 Day Real Food Reset and my favorite healthy food brands.

• And finally a “Dry January” guide to make transitioning to a dry lifestyle fun and doable, whether temporarily or forever.

*NOTE: In order not to miss any of my future posts, subscribe (free) so my emails will land in your inbox.

How We Found Joy in Loss

Our year has been one of loss and unknowns, though not in terms of losing a loved one. For a little backstory, last May my husband lost his corporate officer job but almost immediately got a consulting job that lasted several months. At about the same time I started a job as a private chef. In spite of the job loss, through these jobs and a little unemployment, his severance package was put into savings and virtually untouched. So when we should have felt great loss in 2023, we were spared.

Then January 2024 came around.

I suddenly lost my job two weeks in, because the person I was working for decided they wanted to make a go of cooking for themselves. On January 1 I had kicked off my Real Food Sanity weekly meal plan service with the hope I would get enough paid subscriptions to make a reasonable income. To this day, I make only about $200 a month after expenses. So that wasn’t much.

Kyle was actively networking, getting amazing contacts with companies that would have provided the dream job over and over. Just when he completed his third interview and we would begin planning on what our new life would look like, he would get “the email”. January came and went, then February, March with no offers of a new job and our last unemployment check in April. Suddenly we were without an income at all and seemingly no promise of an income.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Before we knew it, the one year anniversary in May of Kyle’s RIF (“Reduction in Force” as it’s called now removing any humanity from it at all.) came around and we weren’t sure at first if we should even acknowledge it.

After talking through it, we purposed to find joy in the midst of the heartache.

Making Room for Joy

We celebrated the night of his RIF anniversary by enjoying dinner at a place we couldn’t really afford simply to make a statement to ourselves that our lives are not over in this loss. We truly believed in our heart of hearts, and still do, that God is our Provider, not a job.

We came to realize our work is simply a means of impacting this earth in some way, whether it’s creating a meal plan to help a busy mom feel a little less overwhelmed each week or for Kyle, helping a small business understand where they can change a few things to turn their bottom line from red to black. (That by the way is where he’s heading in 2025…consulting small businesses. If you know of one that’s struggling tell them to reach out to Kyle at kyleeflaherty@gmail.com)

As we reflected that night over the last year, we realized that when he was let go, the company gave him 18 weeks of severance pay and there we were 52 weeks later and we had barely touched it.

Oh and by the way…as I’m writing this morning on December 2, over six months after that dinner, we still are watching him provide though our circumstances haven’t changed. We still have no income and though we bought a little tap truck to start a small business, we are operating at a deep loss at the moment. We did run out of severance in September and started using our emergency savings. But even in that, with the severance and emergency savings, we should have only had income to make it 6 months without a regular paying job. So where we are now is nothing short of a miracle of God’s provision.

In spite of all of this, we have more joy and hope for our future than ever. It just keeps growing. I can’t honestly explain it, but I know it’s real.

Joy Isn’t Determined By Your Goodness

You should know, we aren’t faithful church goers. We don’t do all the things that our very conservative upbringings dictated we do to be in “God’s good graces”. We simply have chosen to live by His two main directives - “Love Me and Love Others.”

And within those two basic tenets we’ve found several things:

The love and kindness of Jesus are very real.

Loving Jesus isn’t a list of dos or don’ts; it’s simply hanging out, journaling and having real conversational prayers with Him. Allowing him to be in my heart and intentionally spending time with Him has helped me feel his love and kindness even when it doesn’t look like I thought it would. We haven’t seen many of our prayers answered the way we hoped, like Kyle getting a job, but I’ve never felt closer to Him.

Loving people makes space for forgetting about your circumstances and creating an atmosphere of joy.

Without a real income, it would be easy to hoard what we’ve got. But we love people through sharing our gifts of hospitality - me creating a beautiful meal, Kyle serving wine and thoughtfully crafted cocktails - so we’ve intentionally chosen to invite people to our table multiple times a month when next month’s grocery money isn’t a guarantee.

This is both our church community and our outreach. No, we don’t have a house church, it is simply dinner. Being with people around the table, encouraging them to share their stories, celebrating their wins and losses, giving when there’s a need is church and opens the door for God to be there in ways he can’t in an organized setting. (Come to think of it…that sounds a lot like the original church.)

He truly is our provider and we can’t outgive God.

We’ve proven it practically this year…we continued to send money to those doing the real work of loving people through building homes for widows, digging wells for those without clean water, and traveling to war-torn areas of the world to care for orphans. Again, without an income and yet we have paid our mortgage and all of our bills.

I say all of this not to pat ourselves on the back, it’s truly a miracle that we have marveled at over and over.

The Ultimate Gift

More than anything this time of year, it’s important to remember that he did give his ultimate gift when he chose to become a human and disrupt this earth with a birth that is now celebrated through songs and service for an entire month.

If you’re in a place of bewilderment, through death or other loss, I pray you find the TRUE peace of Jesus in your pain, and within that, you find joy. I challenge you to simply reach out to him upon reading this. However this hits your heart, do it. Let him be a part of your pain and I promise you will ultimately find HIS joy.

Know that as I’m writing this, I’m praying for you as I write this. Even though I may not know you personally, and certainly not what you’re going through, I know the one who knows your deepest thoughts and loves you so much and simply a whispered pray for you, my reader does the trick.

Until next time…

XOXO,

Christi