I Still Believe

Life, as we get older, becomes less magical.

We stop believ­ing in Santa Claus.  The tooth fairy doesn’t come around any­more, and not just because all our baby teeth are gone.  And the Easter bunny.….well don’t even get me started on the Easter bunny!

It’s enough to make any­one hard­ened and cyn­i­cal.  But then I real­ize that we have a whole new world we get to believe in.

We can believe in the sac­ri­fice of a stranger serv­ing in a war thou­sands of miles away just so we can sleep peace­fully at night and wake to unde­ni­able rights that no other coun­try in the world gets to enjoy.

We can believe in the human­ity of a cause whose whole pur­pose is to end teenage sui­cide, and in the peo­ple ded­i­cated to that cause who do it for very lit­tle pay and not enough time with their own families.

And, most impor­tant, we can believe that no mat­ter how much heartache and strug­gle we are going through right now, there is peace, com­fort, and joy on the other side.  And there are peo­ple (like my won­der­ful hus­band) who will be there through the good and the bad.

Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny may be all gone in our grown-up world.  But they have been replaced by some­thing so much more won­der­ful.  Real peo­ple, with real lives, doing good for their fam­ily, for their coun­try and for their planet.

As you start 2012, choose to make this the year that you believe in good­ness.  Promise your­self that you will also be that kind of per­son for oth­ers in your life.

Now that’s some­thing to believe in.