What is it Like to Begin Again?

In so many ways, in so many times of our life, we ask, we wonder, what is it like to begin again? What will it mean and how will we cope?   Whether God is in it or not!  What is it like to have to start over, to rebuild, recreate, renew, and find our way in a world that is dynamic, changing, resistant and difficult?  What is it like to begin again?

There is much in life that we anticipate with joy and excitement, new things emerging in our lives – experiences, babies, events, new work…  Change is everywhere present, and we are able to negotiate some of this well.  Other change is hard to embrace as securities and familiarity disappear or when change is all-consuming.  We feel swept up in the life and storm of being, and feel anxiety, fear and resistance.  New things can be really hard – especially when we feel no control! Getting older, losing a partner, a family member, downsizing our homes, moving to new abodes, leaving friends and neighbours, sometimes our church or state, onto the next phase of life.

New things or possibilities often also mean an ending, that something old is now being set aside, thrown away and lost.  When we think about the new, there is also the old, with the grief and loss associated with its passing.

We are often caught between what was, and what can be – the old thing and the new possibility.  This is precisely the situation we wrestle with in so many of our institutions and organisations at this time in history.  As everything changes so rapidly all around us, we are being driven into new places of meaning, and relevance, to encounter and deal with the world that is our lives.  This is difficult!  In so many ways.  It takes energy and will to embrace the new thing, and not sentimentalise the old.  It sometimes takes courage to step out in faith to engage with the new thing that lies before us – that, which God is perhaps drawing us into.

In the midst of the new thing, and the change that it represents we need to prepare ourselves, and even grieve, in order to accept, embrace and engage the new thing before us. 

The way of God always calls us into new life, new ways, and new possibilities.  God is always doing a new thing because there are always people who need new hope, and new life.  It can be hard to embrace all the change, all the letting go and the unsettling instability that embracing newness can require. My motto is ” LET GO, LET GOD”.

!!!   May God hold and strengthen us and give us the energy through the new times, and the new things that life offers. 

MW