I’ve written about this before but it’s worth repeating.
We stink at staying up to midnight to ring in the New Year. Instead, our New Year’s Eve tradition is a Burning of the Grievances. It’s a great way to identify the pain points of the preceding year – large and small – and allow them to go.
I’m not a believer in karma or bad juju, but I do believe you can let a root of bitterness grow in your heart if you choose to hold on to things that have wronged you or brought you pain. That’s scriptural, in fact.
So we make a bit of a production of it at the end of the year. We write each grievance on a slip of paper, share it with one another and burn them, one by one. This year we wrote the good aspect of the grievance on the back side of the slip, and shared that as well. A silver lining in every cloud, they say. Realistically we know there’s nothing that’s all bad or all good, and it’s good to acknowledge this life fact.
Grief, pain and loss can refine us if we allow God to work through all parts of our experiences. Our Burning of the Grievances helps us remember we have a responsibility to do our part by asking for help and being willing to move forward.
PS – this year we discovered 3 slips (each) in that we had relatively few grievances and many more blessings to share with one another.
