The Week Between

It’s the night before the last day of 2009. It’s raining outside, and I’m cold this evening, with a sore throat. Thank God I took tomorrow off—all I feel like doing is hiding under my electric blanket and staying there for a long, long time.

 

What a dreary ending to the year. Many people have far worse things to complain about; I have far better things to be thankful for. And I am. But sometimes all the disappointments and unfulfilled expectations of a year pile up in that week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, like a long headache. Feeling unwell—in body or spirit—can steal away one’s hope for a new year.

 

My plunging feelings tonight serve to remind me that transitions can sometimes be challenging. Barely a week ago I was sitting in the Nashville airport, anticipating Christmas with my family and looking forward to 2010, which I sensed would bring change. I wrote the following in my journal:

 

Change has already begun. New things are in place—tangible things. And our spirits sense what we can’t yet see, what we don’t yet know. I both long for it and fear it, a little. I fear only what I may have to let go. But I am ready to discover what I get to take hold of.

 

Letting go, taking hold. This is the essence of transition, of change. Of moving from one year into another.

 

More than ever, I will have to change. More than ever, I want to. I have prayed much for it, but now I realize I must be ready for it on a deeper level, and that will require letting go. If I don’t want life to stay as it always has, I have to accept that even the parts I would miss will change too.

 

Maybe this evening of melancholy and malady is simply my soul responding to that need to let go. I have never been one to quickly adjust to change.

 

So, as I preheat my blanket and finish my tea, I hope I dream away the rain as I rest. For this night, too, shall pass. I will let it go and look forward to celebrating one more day of the year—its last—tomorrow. And I will take hold of the hope waiting just around the bend.

 

 

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