The clock will not stop its ticking as the hand of time winds around.
The timeline of my life – your life- includes milestones and important date, victories and losses, joys and pains.
We will look back on the times of mourning and sadness – but only briefly. It is time to begin again.
This is what we will remember. This is what we will look back on and smile. There is a holy rumbling and I feel it shaking many – He is doing a new thing.
Do you see it? If you squint your eyes and look past the black text or the laundry pile, do you see the sun coming?
Light will always win. It just takes one pinprick of light to illuminate the darkness, and we know that when we fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and perfecter of our faith, He will be faithful.
He is doing a new thing and we rejoice.
It is out of the broken that we know what it is to be whole. We can appreciate the torn because He has mended.
In three too-short weeks I will pack my car and load my life into cardboard boxes. In twenty-one days this twenty-one-year-old will drive through the gates of her university for one more year.
It’s a year of lasts and time feels more like a ticking time bomb than a gift. I begin again in August and already my mind is at the End. I am actually a mess, in the messiest sense of the word. This beginning feels a whole lot more like an ending.
But today – just one day at a time – can we choose to look at the present and declare it a present, a gift straight from Him? Because there are beautiful things to be found in the right now.
In the messy.
In the hard.
In the lonely.
In the ordinary and mundane.
In the “I’m not ready for this.”
I’d rather focus on the beginning. He makes all things new and sometimes He gives us our wildest miracle dreams.
But most days? Most days we choose to simply begin again, to breathe in deep and breathe out grace.
My #fmfparty friends, you have wooed me back into the arms of community. We have written on the in between, the after, and the lasts*, but tonight we will begin – together.
We gather. Fast and in five minutes, with sisters and lots of delicious. Every Friday the prompt goes up and #fmfparty slows down. We write. We breathe out our hearts, sharing the hurts and the joys and splitting hearts and words wide open. But tonight we gather to encourage and remember, to offer a warm plate of brownies and a giant hug to Lisa-Jo for leading us well. Change is in store for FMF, but He is always full of new and beautiful beginnings.
*Ironically enough, the #fmfparty post on LASTS was the week before school began last Fall. He just amazes me.
Photos 2 and 3 of the beautiful Aliza’s art.
