Season of Truth

This season arrives wrapped in celebration—songs, lights, gatherings, and familiar stories that promise warmth and peace. And yet, beneath all that brightness, life continues to be what it is: difficult, uneven, and demanding. This year began with weight—family concerns, financial strain, projects that stretched us thin. These are not exceptional stories; they are human ones. Many carry similar burdens quietly, especially during seasons meant for joy.

Celebration can sometimes become a way of escaping reality. We gather, we smile, we perform happiness, hoping the noise will soften what we are afraid to face. Fairy tales help us imagine endings where everything resolves neatly. But real life does not work that way. Maturity slowly teaches us something more honest: life is hard. Not because it lacks meaning, but because it asks much from us. 

Life is too long to be consumed by every difficulty, yet too short to let those difficulties define us.  What it is long enough for is learning the discipline of noticing small victories—of seeing beauty in persistence, in survival, in continuing even when clarity is absent. What can change us is not the absence of struggle, but the shift in how we look at it, a refocusing of the lens.

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun—joy and sorrow have always existed. We cannot add to them or remove them. But we can choose perspective. One may be undone by what another learns to carry with grace. Meaning is not universal; it is shaped by how we see.

Perhaps this season invites us not to escape reality, but to face it differently—together. In human solidarity, we are called to choose strength over weakness, clarity over despair. Jesus reminded us that the greatest commandment begins with love: love God fully, and love others as you love yourself—nothing more, nothing less.

To celebrate, then, is not to deny hardship, but to meet it with courage, compassion, and care. And in doing so, we may find that this, too, is a way of becoming whole.