Do small things in a great way. Those are the life moments inscribed in our hearts.
I've never been a fan of "It's A Wonderful Life" - mainly because I'm not a fan of Jimmy Stewart.
If somehow you are not familiar with the iconic 1946 movie, "Jimmy Stewart starred as George Bailey, a big-hearted family man who wonders if the world would be better off if he was never born. George's compassion for others shuts him off from his dreams and forces him to live in a small town as a building and loan banker. When taking the blame for someone else's mistake lands George in hot water, he contemplates suicide until an angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) shows him what the world would look like without him."
Last year, for the first time ever, I actually enjoyed watching this movie. Maybe it was COVID, maybe it's getting older, maybe I finally just saw it enough times that I got past his accent, but for the first time, I actually enjoyed the movie.
Maybe I was just getting nostalgic for small-town America (I grew up in a small Ohio town) or maybe it was the values of basic goodness and sacrifice (sooo missing in today's society), or maybe it was the strong presence of community, friendship, and belonging that is so prominent in the movie, which strangely got stronger in some ways during COVID and in other ways further apart.
Or maybe it was George's character learning (the hard way) to define the success of his life not through money or what it can buy, but through his character and the impact he made on others. "Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"
David G. Allan writes, "We are all George Bailey. We have dreams unrealized. We are stressed by daily life. We don’t fully appreciate what we have, or what we’ve managed to accomplish despite our obstacles. We are too often focused on the wrong things. And we are closer than we realize to a huge, catastrophic meltdown triggered by a single financial calamity."
So if I could be any character in a holiday movie it would be George Bailey. As Allan writes, it's "Love for friends and family, the decency we exchange with those around us, the value of not doing “great things” but small things in a great way."
How many of us look at our lives from the viewpoint of what we’ve managed to accomplish despite our obstacles? I'd wager that most of us look more at the obstacles and what we feel they prevented us from accomplishing.
So as you go through this Christmas season be a George Bailey. Do small things in a great way. Those are the life moments inscribed in our hearts.
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