Blog 3703 – 12.25.2025

A Day When Friends and Families Gather

Whether you call the day Christmas or Saturnalia, the pagan Roman holiday it replaced, Hanukkah, Kwanza, or perhaps some other name, it is day meant to gather with friends and family, to celebrate the tie that binds. “Blessed be the tie that binds.”

The day is a day meant to be joyous, but sadly for too many it has become a day of mourning with too much focus on lost loved one and not enough focus on the loved ones still here to enjoy.

My daughter Emily has been gone for thirteen and a half years. The year before she died, in her annual Father’s Day mixed CD she included a song called If I Could by Jack Johnson:

It might help us on this day when friends and family gather to consider what one New Testament writer wrote: “Seeing as we are encompassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses let us run with patience (endurance) the race that is set before us.” Just who are in the great cloud of unseen witnesses? Why, the dearly departed friends and family that we love and miss so much many of whom are waiting another turn in this time and space construct where we find ourselves.

One goes it one comes in.

Have a wonderful day whatever you choose to call it.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

JACK JOHNSON if i could lyrics

JACK JOHNSON if i could lyrics

Author’s Note:

I think the last two lines of the second verse of the song should read:

And though you gotta go we’ll keep a piece of your soul

One goes out, one comes in.