The Yearly Question

This is the first Christmas we will spend without our daddy at home. Our family has always been very close with lots of traditions that have maintained throughout our childhood and carried over to our adulthood. One tradition, that my dad started about the time me and my sisters were all able to think for ourselves (pretty young since we are all girls. haha), was the yearly questions. Dad was always good at asking questions at the dinner table or before bed, but the yearly questions were a bit tougher to answer. They always required thought and somehow a piece of yourself...questions about your future, your greatest victory, a time when you chose to forgive, a time when you should have, about making friends, or learning lessons. All questions that could transform your thought processes.

Every year I would spend time before Christmas Eve trying to figure out what the question was going to be that year. But inevitably, he would go a completely different direction than I was prepared to go. When 7pm on December 24th came around, after the nachos had been eaten and the Christmas story had been carefully read from Luke 2, the question was asked of each of us. We gave our answers, usually through teary eyes, and followed that time with sweet times of prayer for one another based on our answers. So, this year, dad will not be able to ask the questions, but I will sit beside him and share about the wonderful ways that he shaped our lives with the questions he did get to ask.