Back in 2014, I fundraised on kickstarter for a children/family book called Santa’s Prayer. It was my first experience publishing a book, and the feedback I received from so many reporting spiritual and emotional experiences meant more to me than any other benefit yielded. Rather than focus on the book itself for this entry, I thought I might share the story and context surrounding the project.
What many probably don’t know is that just two years before announcing the Santa’s Prayer fundraiser, I had hit the absolute rock-bottom crisis in my life. After a series of business and financial failures in my late twenties and early thirties, I had also just dropped out of law school, was buried with debt, my marriage was falling apart, my confidence was shattered and I was so filled with anxiety, I literally didn’t trust myself to make a single decision. Though it couldn’t even cover our bills each month, I was clinging to a dead-end job I had gotten during law school and couldn’t bring myself to believe there was anything else out there for me, any possible path toward success in any aspect of life that really mattered to me.
Uncertain about the future and our marriage, my wife decided to move back home to Utah. Despite believing there were fewer opportunities there, I didn’t want to split up our family, so I essentially followed her, finally leaving the job and moving back to Utah with no plan. We ended up in a rather tenuous situation living in my mother-in-law’s basement–for the third time. Shortly after getting settled, I met up with an old film-school buddy that still seemed to have faith in me, and after hearing about the book I had written and was starting to illustrate, he helped me wade through the mechanics of the fundraiser and the process of printing. Without him, I couldn’t have handled it at that time.
Though the mechanical aspects were difficult for me, the writing and illustrating of the characters–the young innocent children, the ancient and deeply pious Santa, and the savior Jesus for whom he felt the greatest reverence, actually played an important role in what has now been a decade-long journey out of those depths of darkness and despair. While writing and illustrating, I felt closer to God than I had in a long time. I cried every time I read back through the story (at least when I was by myself) because the story resonated with my own true feelings, the depths of my own respect, my own awareness of the reality, the love, and the grace of Jesus Christ.
After years of hearing people report a cathartic spiritual experience reading Santa’s Prayer, I tried to analyze the story to discover what connected their experiences reading with my own as I wrote it. I realized that while Santa Claus, in our modern commercial environment, has become a rather inaccessible two-dimensional icon driven by an unexplainable obsession to ensure each child receives products from Amazon or Walmart stores, I realized my version treated him as a real, complex person.
I realized his character was actually based on real people, the compilation of hundreds of wise, spiritual, humble men and women I’ve met throughout my life, some elderly and some still in grade school. He was the purest, most mature part of human spirit and personality, that (unfortunately) rare state of mind in which I’ve personally succeeded in reaching God through prayer, and experienced direct love and inspiration from him.
The Santa in my book was a man likely acquainted with grief, rejection, and abandonment, who, instead of blaming and turning from God in his pain, recognized how much closer he had come to seeing eye to eye with him. This Santa no longer just believed in Christ, but through long stretches of faithful patience through his own agony and confusion, he actually knew him. The mere thought of Christ filled him with the most profound love, respect, and gratitude. I think those touched by the story also had personal life-experience that made this Santa’s priorities and motivations familiar and sensible to them.
I realized that my heart also poured out through the three children in the story. The young boy Zach’s immediate desire to improve behavior and serve, Molly’s willingness to sacrifice the closest thing to her heart, and the clarity with which the oldest sister understood and felt the truth as well as the purity of her desire to pass the gratitude she felt to God, these characters declared the things I longed to express in my life at the time, but which I felt became tarnished and hidden under the rubble of my failures, imperfections and self-doubt.
What made Santa’s Prayer such an important part of my own healing process was that for the first time in many years, I felt it gave me a voice, a way to communicate what I knew and felt deep in my heart, but which had been silenced under fear and anxiety. In a way, the process of expressing myself through this art form outsmarted the weaknesses that had bound my tongue and convinced me I was of little use in accomplishing much good in drawing others closer to Christ. Every time a reader expressed how touched they were by the book, it meant more to me than they really knew. It was evidence my mind couldn’t easily dismiss that I could serve some purpose for good in the grand scheme. These reports provided a wedge that held the door of hope open, despite overwhelming evidence that seemed bent on convincing me I wasn’t capable of succeeding in something I could feel good about.
So if you are one of those who really appreciated this story and mentioned it to me, though I likely appeared awkward and uncomfortable with the complement, thank you for the hope, strength and encouragement you probably didn’t realize made you an angel to me, the bearer of a tender, encouraging gift from God.
Despite passing through those difficult, painful years, they taught me what mattered most to me. They gave me the opportunity to make conscious decisions about what was worth spending my life fighting for, and what was not worth paying attention to. It has been a slow but steady climb for my wife and I since those days that were darkest in 2012. We’ve spent years in counseling, learning more than anything to focus only on the beam in our own eyes, to controlling the hurt, childish monster inside of ourselves that always thinks it’s actions are justified because its feelings are hurt. We’ve learned how to support one another, and have gained deep respect just by watching the other overcome things we knew were extremely challenging to the individual. We’ve each broken through layers of self-doubt and discovered how much holding onto our own fears and pain were unfairly tormenting the other. Somehow all that work, all that humility, all that patience ended up, on its own merits, transforming into a solid demonstration of love for each other.
There’s plenty more I could share about the accomplishment she and I now share, which is a success in my life I am most proud of. But the purpose of this post was to share my gratitude for the part the Santa’s Prayer project played in helping me experience hope, a sense of purpose, and proved fertile ground for seeds of confidence that eventually blossomed into a new life.
