IMPORTANT :: Five-Minute Friday returns
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IMPORTANT
Many folks begin a new calendar year hoping to gain clarity on what’s important for the coming twelve months. I always hope to do this in some kind of organized fashion, hopefully from a zen-like, post-holiday setting. It never happens that way for me. Or, I should say, I can’t remember if that’s ever happened for me, but I always hold the image in my mind as an ideal memory.
This year, once again, I hoped for a day or even a few hours of time that felt clear and focused to gather what I’ve learned in the past twelve months and what I desire for the next twelve. It never came. On Thursday (yesterday) I facilitated a two-hour virtual retreat for A Sacramental Life Community and still, the clarity didn’t really arrive.
What did happen, instead, was a sense of wellbeing. We continue to move collectively through the unknown days and months of this health crisis, trying to pace ourselves to the herky-jerky stop and start rhythms of a global pandemic. As much as I’d like a period to come at the end of the sentence of this frustrating, agonizing, bewildering era of human history with the turn of a calendar page, that’s not the reality. During our retreat, I was reminded of what one of my spiritual directees told me once “God is in the reality.”
Want to know where God is at work? Look to the reality of your life.
Last week, after a morning trying to settle in to focus on work and life goals for the coming year, I bundled up for a walk at the neighborhood park which runs along a seawall for the Long Island Sound. The fresh air did blow some cobwebs away but didn’t bring much else into focus. Halfway through the walk, I paused to take a few photos of the sparkling ocean water and January blue skies. A woman I’ve seen often on this particular walk shuffled by with her walker. Without breaking step in her slow stride, she glanced up to greet me and moved past. Something about her determined movement and focus on the immediate steps in front of her - one shuffle step after another up the gradual incline of the seawall - stirred my heart. I took a photo.
Another part of the walkway winds around a raised terrace for grass, a flag pole, and some benches. I noticed an older gentleman, stooped sideways against the coastal wind, removing a Christmas wreath from one of the benches. In its place, he carefully inserted two long-stemmed red roses - one on either side of the bench’s memorial plaque. I wanted to take a photo of him, too but decided against it.
Without overanalyzing why these two particular people caught my attention, I just want to notice that they felt important to me during a week I felt stuck between what has been and what will be. Until I closed our retreat in prayer, I hadn’t thought too much about the significance of that walk or those two elderly neighbors. In my prayer, I thanked God for being the same yesterday, today, and forever. I offered adoration to God as the Alpha and Omega and to Christ as the one who holds all things together - the past, present, and future of the world and our individual lives. As I prayed, I sensed the Spirit naming himself for this moment right now as the I AM.
I shuffle into the new year, holding the promise that all that is important for me to know and experience is held together and, in fact, present to me right now in Christ. I adjust myself to the pace of God and bear witness to his movement in, around, and through me. May it be so all year.
This is our first Five-Minute Friday post in 2022. Thanks for being a listening community and a safe place to offer stories from my everyday experiences and epiphanies. I'm grateful for your companionship.
p.s., You can read all the Five-Minute Friday posts here.