The Meet Hope Podcast
The Meet Hope Podcast
102: Perfection is Not Our Goal at the Holidays (or ever)
Thanksgiving is this Thursday, but Amanda Cavaliere (THPS Preschool Director, Marriage & Parenting Coordinator) and Heather Mandela (Pastor of Families) are here to convince us that gratitude shouldn’t wait for a holiday invitation. Join in as Amanda and Heather explore the art of letting go of picture-perfect expectations and shifting focus towards meaningful connections.
NOTES:
- Contact heather@meethope.org or amanda@meethope.org
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Welcome to the Meet Hope Podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope our world for the sake of others.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Hope. Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. We're so glad that you are joining us this week, as it's going to be Thanksgiving and my name is Amanda Cavalieri. I'm here with Heather Mandela.
Speaker 3:Hi everybody.
Speaker 2:And we are going to talk about Thanksgiving. Yes, and it's really gratitude.
Speaker 3:Yes, because, right, that's what Thanksgiving's all about, and for years, you'd see the posts on social media. You know a gratitude thought, a day and things like that, because it is easy to get caught up in the negative Right and to forget the importance of gratitude.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but also gratitude although we talk about it now because it's Thanksgiving really needs to be an attitude that we carry all year.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And it's something that we can be teaching our kids something that we can be practicing for ourselves.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:And so that's really why we're having this conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think one of the points that comes up often is that when things are challenging in our lives, it can be hard to find or to feel grateful.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, and so we have to be super intentional during those times in our lives about finding things to be grateful for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and the holidays is as wonderful as they can be, can also be hard as well, and so needing to find those grateful moments in every day is so important.
Speaker 3:Absolutely and letting go of unrealistic expectations, even being aware of our expectations, you know, so that we can say like, hey, I am expecting Thanksgiving dinner may not go perfectly, someone's going to say something that's going to tick somebody else off, you know, the turkey is going to be over dry or something's going to go wrong. Right, and just recognizing that perfection is not our goal in the holidays, whether it's Thanksgiving or Christmas, perfection is not our goal, right? So defining for you and your family what is your goal, yeah, right, um, I know, for us, I have to remind myself repeatedly my goal is that people would feel welcomed into my home. That's it, that they would feel loved and welcomed. And you're probably getting Thanksgiving dinner on a pretty Thanksgiving paper plate Because I've adjusted expectations. The food will be really good, but I'm not spending five hours doing dishes afterwards.
Speaker 3:So, we modified that right, so it's adjusting, it's recognizing expectations, it's figuring out what your goal is for that holiday and then working towards it instead of against it.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, my goal is to just be together with people I love and I am not hosting, and last year didn't host and wanted to and was invited to my brother's and at first was hesitant because I wanted to do it and then realized, well, I don't have to cook. So you know what I can be together with people I love anywhere. Find just the gratitude.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. And when we do let go of that, when we recognize, like, what is my actual goal? Right, if my actual goal is to serve the best Thanksgiving meal ever, I'm going to run all over people in the process, right, because they're going to be in my way. They're not going to do things the way I want it, they're not going to have it look perfect. I'm the only one that can fold the napkins this way. I'm the only one that's going to be able to set right. So if our goal is a perfect Thanksgiving dinner, then we need to invite absolutely no one else, because the people mess it up. Yeah, and I don't think that's ever a goal, right.
Speaker 2:So all right. So, but when it's not Thanksgiving, right. So what are things that you do throughout the year to try and keep gratitude at the forefront? How do you, how are you grateful throughout the year? That is a great question.
Speaker 3:Um, I think that I wish I was better first at keeping that in the forefront of my mind. You know, um, I think that one of the biggest things I have is my community. So when people see that I'm stuck somewhere, you know where I'm really in a low place, or I'm fighting the negativity in my life, they're there to kind of point out where God is, you know, and they're not doing it in a way that's like you shouldn't feel sad, they're doing it in a way that's like this really sucks. I am so glad I can sit beside you in it. You know, and I'm like me too right, they're not fixing it, they're not, they're just being with me and I can be grateful for that presence and I think that we can be grateful during hard times.
Speaker 2:We don't want to minimize people's pain Right Like oh, that's not a big deal, Look at this silver lining. We don't want to do that Right. But we also want to help people find the goodness.
Speaker 3:But we also want to help people find the goodness Right, find the things that we can be grateful for, and sometimes it feels like I'm grateful that I'm breathing and that's all I got Right, like I don't, you know. And that's where, when we're in community, people can say, well, I'm really grateful you're breathing too. I'm also really grateful that you're here right now with me and I'm really grateful that you know you showed up at X, y or Z, you know. So there's again that finding community that can help. You see that there are things doesn't.
Speaker 3:I think that we can be grateful for people who are willing to sit in the yuck with us too, you know, who know they can't fix it and who are just willing to be there, right? I think that's huge. I've certainly tried a lot in the past, right? So, raising kids, I always wanted gratitude to be something that was a value we raised in the household. My 22-year-old recently was cleaning out a closet and found gratitude journals that I had started with them when they were probably in third and fourth grade, and I think there was all of one page done.
Speaker 2:The journals weren't full.
Speaker 3:Why weren't the journals full? Because I think mom gave up. I was like come on, kids, write in your gratitude journals and then after three years, I'm like that's it, I don't care, I am no longer grateful for gratitude journals.
Speaker 2:It's hard to do things like that and to stick with it. I know in my house. So we we say grace before dinner, but one thing we do is before we thank.
Speaker 3:God, for the food is everyone has to share something they're grateful for from that day.
Speaker 2:I love that and you know, my kids sometimes say I had a good day at school. And then I'm like well, what was good, what made it good, like we really press into it, because then that adds to the conversation after we say grace. But we all share something we're grateful for in the day, even if it was a hard day, even if it was a bad day. When I I say something like the weather was so nice, they know that that was a bad day. Three kids puked.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But it's showing them again like let's find the goodness of the day and let's talk about the not so good parts too, but thanking God for all of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yep, and that's such an important concept that even we as adults struggle with right, right, and we do have the advantage of age, so I can look back on my life and I can look at things that I went through and I can recognize that I am better today. Right, I look more like Jesus because I walked through a certain hard time, right, and it forced me to rely more on him. In that moment I probably couldn't see that, right, I wasn't excited to be walking through a really hard time because I was going to look more like Jesus on the other side, but I have that gift of experience and they don't yet, right.
Speaker 2:Well, and one thing in a parenting small group that I ran this fall, we talked about different milestones and one of them we talked about was perspective. And when our kids are struggling and we know that what they're sharing with us really in the grand scheme of life is no big deal right, we can help them find that perspective by saying if this was on a scale of one to 10, how hard is this 10,?
Speaker 1:how hard is this?
Speaker 2:And so I had this conversation with my kids at dinner one night and I said okay, so let's, let's think about a hard time, let's think about something hard and and what? What would be in a scale of one to 10, you know how, how are things in life? And my middle school daughter said well, everything's a nine or 10. Right, and so I said well, okay, so if our house caught fire, she's oh, that's a 10. That's a 10. Right, said, if you worked really hard on a homework project and left it at home, what's that? And she said oh, that's a three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess not everything's a 10. Right. And so, using that language, as they find hard times, to say like, okay, they come home, they've had a hard day, and for us to say what was hard about it, and they and, and and us to say, yeah, that was hard, but on a scale one to 10, and for them to be able to say, I guess, maybe it was a five you know and that not everything is is a 10 and giving them some perspective so that we can find gratitude when we have that perspective.
Speaker 3:I love that.
Speaker 2:I really do when we live up in the everything's horrible all the time. We can't be grateful.
Speaker 3:We can't be grateful. There's no room. No, right, right, there's no room. And some of us, whether because we are in middle school or because we are just wired a little more to rely on our emotions, do feel like everything is a 10. So teaching those tools even to ourselves, where we can be saying like, okay, if losing my house, losing my family member, losing my what is a 10,? Where does this really fall?
Speaker 2:And not that this isn't hard or challenging, and that's important to have empathy with them in that, absolutely. But we're not going to stay there. But that's important to have empathy with them in that.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. But we're not going to stay there, but it's perspective right, and this is a temporary hard thing, right, this is a temporary hard thing that I have to face and walk through and it really, really sucks, and sometimes you know we are living in tens right. We really do. There are times where we live in the ten, but it's not all the time.
Speaker 3:Yes, and it is those times in particular where we can rely on the community around us to help carry us through them, right? So when God tells us that we're supposed to carry each other's burdens, yeah, that's what it means, right, like those are those times when that burden is so big that we cannot pick it up anymore, that our community comes around us and helps us carry and that up anymore, that our, that our community comes around us and helps us carry, and um, and that gives us something to be grateful for, right there.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you know you had brought something up before too, and, um, you had talked about, uh, the difficulty being grateful when we feel like we're entitled.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. So I mean, when we are living in an entitlement mindset you know, that belief that everything I'm deserving of, everything right, that I'm in a privilege or I should have special treatment, when we live in a space of entitlement, we don't have gratitude, we can't, we cannot be grateful for something that we think we already deserve. And I feel like entitlement is such a pervasive thing right now in our culture. So many people are living in this space of well, I deserve that and I deserve this and the way we treat others and the way that we think of others and um, as parents, if we want our kids to be grateful, we need to be modeling that right in in in our interactions and our words.
Speaker 2:When we're, when we're modeling entitlement, they're going to pick that up instead. So I'm thinking particularly of a day. Uh, tuesdays are long days for me. I work.
Speaker 1:I go to an appointment.
Speaker 2:Um, in the fall, my daughter played field hockey and, of course, this particular Tuesday it was like 45 minutes away. So go right from one thing to the next to field hockey, to church for confirmation class and small group, and on the way from field hockey back and I'm on like this time crunch, I need a gas, right. So I pulled into a gas station and I'm waiting for the gas and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting and other cars are pulling in and this guy, the attendant, is just taking care of everybody else's gas but me. And I'm sitting there and I am just verbally berating this person because why doesn't he see me? And I was here first and I need my gas and I'm busy and I'm tired and I've had a bad day and I'm hungry and I want I deserve right now. Okay, karen, right, exactly. And and I'm saying these things and I'm just thinking I'm saying this person in the back seat is hearing these things instead of taking a breath and realizing I've had a long, hard day.
Speaker 3:But maybe he has too.
Speaker 2:Maybe somebody called out and that's why he's running around by himself. Maybe he doesn't see me, maybe something bad is happening in his life and his mind is somewhere else. Right, I'm carrying that entitled attitude, and so I can't feel anything else, anything else. Right? And now I'm modeling that for my kid too.
Speaker 3:And we. It's so easy to slip into it. It's so easy to slip into it we don't even notice it sometimes. So, like, good for you for recognizing it.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean not then Later, I just was mad.
Speaker 3:Yes, you were just mad. But yes, no, and I understand that and we do, you know, and we. It's funny because we see it in little kids, right?
Speaker 1:How often?
Speaker 3:do we deal with this? That's not fair mentality. And you're right, life is not fair, you know and that was. We said that to our kids from the time they were born. It's not fair. If you expect fairness, you are doomed to be disappointed because it's not going to happen. But we can fight for justice and we can be curious, right? So there are things we can do.
Speaker 2:And it's checking our attitude. Yeah, it's checking our attitude, yeah.
Speaker 3:And when we have a grateful attitude right.
Speaker 3:So then it allows us to what our default is gratitude, yes. Then it allows us room for curiosity, and it allows us room and it doesn't mean we don't stand up for what is right. In fact, all the more so we can Right Because we recognize the difference between our own entitlement and actual things that need to be fought for. Yeah, yeah, helps us as a society as well, when we teach our kids and when we work on ourselves to have that attitude of gratitude, so that we can truly be ready and willing to listen and learn about others. Absolutely, yeah. So so, as you guys enter into this holiday season, it's not just Thanksgiving, it's Christmas, it's Advent, it's New Year's, it's all those things and lots of opportunities for disappointment, if we're honest, let's be honest.
Speaker 3:How we receive the season is going to depend a lot on what we're looking for.
Speaker 2:Yes, the lens that we are looking through.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And what our actual goals for those seasons are, you know, are our goals to have the best, most expensive gifts under the tree? Or are our goals to create an environment where our kids feel loved, seen and valued? Right? And we do that, maybe, by gifting some things that they really want, that we know reflect their passions and their joys and their pleasures, and spending time together and pouring into each other and being grateful for the experiences we have together.
Speaker 3:And when we start to mentally switch our minds from what we are acting like our goals are right the best Thanksgiving dinner ever, best Christmas presents under the tree to what our real, true goal is right. Those are things that we're using. Those are vehicles where we're trying to get to our true goal, which is connection and relationship and love and value and joy and appreciation and all those things. We might actually get a little bit closer to retaining them. Yeah, so we'd love to hear your thoughts, know your stories as well. You can always reach us out to us at meethopeorg. And until next time we will see you soon, happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. And until next time we will see you soon, happy Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:Happy Thanksgiving or find us on socials at meethopechurch.