With all the sad,sad, attention grabbing headlines right now, I have found myself having to call heavily on my faith and belief in forgiveness in order to see hope for those families, and also for myself in my own struggles. After so many have been quick to toss the proverbial stones, I am glad to see that some also have extended the hope of forgiveness to these families in the stories.

These lives have gone so wrong, many of us cannot seem to wrap our minds around it. Things did not seem to be able to be fixed for them, and the result of the pent up frustration and anger has forever changed their lives. I am sure these families would give anything to go back and change what went wrong. So many of us go along with that belief that if we just had enough patience or love, and we were just strong enough we should be able to fix the things that are not right with us and our children, but please consider this...

Even our heavenly father could not love us enough to make us right. Even he had to make the decision to sacrifice one child, his only begotten son, to save another... us.

With the holiday season, honoring the birth of that precious savior, and amid all the struggles so many families are going through right now, my own included, I had to pause and really consider the gravity of that sacrifice.

God could not make us right.

He tried. He sent laws, he sent teachers and pastors. He sent punishments of famine, disease and pestilence, yet nothing worked. We could not be made right. Finally he decided to give up a piece of himself in a last ditch attempt to heal what was wrong with us. He loves us that much. If he could not ‘fix’ us, he could at least grant us forgiveness, if we accepted it...right?

As a parent he had a few things in that journey that many of us did not. He knew what he was up against before hand. He knew what the outcome would be the very day that a part of himself was born into our world of pain in Bethlehem. He knew that child would be giving the ultimate, his own life, in order to at least grant us some shot at forgiveness, and yet many will not accept it and will still be lost today, over 2,000 years later. It should be as simple as our seeing the sacrifice of our heavenly father and accepting our part in the reconciliation, but as so many of us learn in our life here on earth, the love, and the gesture is still often just not enough.

All the stories coming out during this time have only served to make my heart hurt more. The mother who could not find enough help to keep from fatally harming her child, the family who must have struggled for years in ways we can not comprehend, only to be condemned because they could not heal their daughter and choose to surrender her, the newborn found by some teens clinging to life, swaddled in a dumpster. Why do we humans expect to be able to fully heal each other or ourselves?

Even God could not make us right.

To me that does not mean that there is no hope at all, quite the contrary. The hope is in the forgiveness. That is what the arrival of that newborn in Bethlehem was all about. Doing all we as flawed human beings are able, we may be successful, and we might also fail, and fail miserably. God knew that, this is why he sent his son, for that last bit of hope through extending us a chance at forgiveness.

I am hoping tonight that I am forgiven. I also am praying forgiveness for that mother in prison, the struggling adoptive family who have left their child behind, for the mother who wrapped up her newborn and laid her in the garbage. I have hope they will reach out for the forgiveness, because as long as we reside here on this earth the healing is as difficult to secure as sand through our fingers.

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