Accepting the Unexpected Journey

I have spent the last year in the wilderness, watching the old me burn to ashes so that I could be reborn into something that is still me, but better. But the wilderness doesn’t have to be a place of desolation, it can be a place of growth that we often cannot see until we are safely back at home. And now the phoenix is once again learning to take flight, ready to leave the wilderness for something better than was there before. As scary as that unknown is, I’m ready to see where it will fly next.

my classroom and jumping at every sniffle and cough, I was now exiled to one room of my house, only leaving on occasion with a mask covering my face and unable to hug my babies and sleep next to my husband.

But as I prepare to exit 2021, I’m realizing that maybe my choice of the word “light” was really less about what I was going to do during the past year and more about what God was going to do for me through the light of others. In a year that was completely unexpected, I can finally see the faint glimmer of light at the end of the dark tunnel. It’s not fading; it’s growing.

When I watch high school and college athletics, I see children. I see children with adult bodies and adolescent brains trying to achieve great things. When they lose, I see their pain and heartbreak and hurt for them, even when it’s the opposing team. (And yes, that even included the Ohio State players that I watched crumble in the final moments of their first loss in ten years to Michigan.) When they win, I remember that it’s not my victory, but theirs, and they are just letting the rest of us celebrate with them.

Holiday traditions change because we change. Some of those changes are within our control and others are changes we have to learn to accept as changes that have nothing to do with us. While some of those changes can hurt us, when we find a way through those changes, we can continue to make the holidays are own, celebrations that capture where we are in a given moment, even if those moments are painful.

years of a pandemic, after two years of so much talk about what was and was not working for us before we even heard of coronavirus, after two years of asking what a “new normal” could look like, can we possibly start talking about a paradigm shift away from this materialistic way of looking at our “needs” and the economy?