Goodness Weekly 12.22.25
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
As we wrap up the year, we’re grateful for all that’s taken root across the Sunset Ridge Collective—from meaningful partnerships and shared spaces to the everyday moments of connection happening on campus. As we head into the holiday season, a quick reminder to stop by One Another Coffee before Christmas Day, as they’ll be closed December 25–January 2. Gift cards and merchandise from One Another Coffee make easy, thoughtful gifts while also supporting a beloved campus partner.
Transforming the Holidays We’re Given
Amy Lynn Johnson, Communications Manager, Sunset Ridge Collective
I love family Christmas cards—the unexpected delight of finding them in your mailbox during the whirlwind that is the holiday season brings me so much joy. Seeing what families I’ve known for years are up to and how their children have grown. Feeling remembered by them because they took the time to address and send it to my family. It’s been years since I’ve sent my own though.
Originally, it was because of the cost. As a single mama of four trying to make the holidays special for my own kids, sending Christmas cards out to friends and family became a cost that I couldn’t justify with my modest means.
Over time, there was also the severing of connections, and the grief of not seeing my kids every Christmas that came with divorce and shared custody. When you’re focused on figuring out the new normal of post-divorce life, it can be easy for the community you once had to slip away when you don’t have the same capacity to proactively root yourself in it. Or difficult for people to know how to show up and support you in it. When someone you know experiences the death of a loved one, there are common things we know to do despite how we may fumble in finding the words to offer them. But with divorce, especially in families, the loss can seem so much more ambiguous—but run just as deep.
My family hasn’t looked like the ones on the Christmas cards I still occasionally receive in nearly a decade now. And there have been years when my kids are with their dad on Christmas when that has weighed on me heavily. The acceptance of that change gets a little easier to deal with as the years go by. But there can often be a tint of that mourning in years when my kids are not with me to delight in opening presents Christmas morning like we did every uninterrupted year together when they were younger. And that separation doesn’t just happen around the holidays—it happens with birthdays and first days of school, with family reunions and graduations.
Divorced parenting forces you to sit with discomfort. Like a monk in meditation, learning to sit in stillness without scratching the itch that seems to grow to the size of a balloon on his nose. You can resist the discomfort and struggle, or you can breathe through it, find your center, and pivot your thoughts—be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
That renewal for me has looked like new traditions with my kids during the holidays—in years with and without them on Christmas. Gratefully this year is one my kids are with me for Christmas. We’ve always been big board game players, but as they’ve gotten to the teenage years, they’ve become less enthused about them and I’ve had to find stealthier ways to gather us around the table to enjoy the luxury of time through shared play.
In most recent years, that’s looked like puzzles instead of board games—and a new family puzzle has become a go-to gift to crack open together at the beginning of their holiday break with me—even if they’ve started rolling their eyes ever so slightly in their obligatory teenage resistance to mom’s antics of togetherness.
A previous year of holiday puzzling.
This year’s puzzle is underway—opened early so there’s (hopefully) time to finish putting all the pieces together before they leave to spend the rest of their school break with their dad over New Year’s. We’ll piece it together and face this mini, inconsequential challenge together, as a family, celebrating in this new picture of wholeness emerging from our own hands. Whether my teenagers will be able to name the deeper meaning of putting a simple puzzle together is a different story—but one that I hope will root and hold meaning for them as they begin their own families and holiday traditions in the years to come.
The holidays can be a time when the things we don’t have in life can feel magnified—whether it’s family, a partner, money, or loved ones lost—and the pressure to have those things can be intensified. No matter where you’re at on the spectrum of holiday happiness this year, I invite you to sit with whatever discomforts may be bubbling up for you. Let that discomfort guide you to the deeper meaning of what your heart is yearning for—and welcome new ways to transform it into a path beyond the one you were so anchored to before.
Coming Up…
Daily, NYX Yoga & Fitness
Thursdays-Sundays, Scott’s Pizza, Charis Park
Wednesday, December 24th, 5:00 PM, Christmas Eve Service, Sunset Ridge Church
Wednesday, December 24th - Friday, January 2nd, Office closed for Christmas & New Year’s
Thursday, December 25th - Friday, January 2nd, One Another Coffee closed for Christmas & New Year’s
Saturdays, Sunset Ridge Farmers Market, 9 AM - 1 PM, Charis Park
Sundays, Worship at 9 AM and 11 AM, Sunset Ridge Church
Event Rentals - Interested in hosting your event at Charis Park or in our facilities? Please email rentals@sunset-ridge.org
Community Partners: For updated schedules and events please follow One Another Coffee, Sunset Ridge Farmers Market, NYX Wellness, Scott’s Pizza, Mission Compost, Sprouts School, Good Acres, and Community First Food Pantry.
Inhale: I welcome what is
Exhale: Renew my mind
