A Blessing for When You Want to Change (But Not Overnight)
You don’t have to leap into a new life. You can tiptoe.
Blessed are you who begin again.
You who resist the pressure to overhaul your entire life in a weekend.
Who pick one underwhelming thing and say:
“This. I can do this. Probably.”
Blessed are we, the slow changers,
Hungry for all that makes life good,
but exhausted by the thought of what it might take to get there.
We who want to pause long enough to ask:
Is this mine to do?
And can I do it without becoming completely unbearable?
For we are the back-to-school grownups trying again,
with a commitment to
One Reasonable Thing.
That probably won’t fix us, but hope to make usmore loving,
and less prone to raging at people in the car.
More compassionate,
and less delusional.
More attuned to the good,
and less enslaved by the “should.”
May these small habits help us become.
Not our best selves.
But faithful and present and less cranky by dinner.
May we be open to all that God is doing
in us and through us.
And maybe, just maybe, we will change.
Slowly. Faithfully.
All with the help of God.
On the cancer road, I've had to redefine myself and what I stand for...and then I had to go back and re-redefine, back to what had been abandoned, clear away the rust (literally!), determine where I had quit...and begin again.
Not that the first redefinition had been a mistake. Far from it! But I had changed, and as the situation becomes more hopeless (I'm able to eat one small bowl of rice a day, bite by measured bite, and bottled water is my bestie...well, along with Bud Lite Lime), I'm more hopeful.
My world has narrowed, but the reach of my arms has grown wider. I can embrace big dreams again, not in defiance, not in denial, but in a singing joy that utterly confounds my poor dear wife.
I can really only attribute this to Isaiah 6...
I heard the voice of the Lord: "Who will go before me? Whom shall I send?"
And I said, "Here am I. Send me."
That's the deal. We go out, each day, and everything we do can have a purpose, if we accept it, without demands or preconditions.
Will I finish the aeroplane that's slowly coming together in the living room (and dining room, and kitchen, and spare bedroom, and walk-in closet...)? Possibly, possibly not. Well, probably not.
But I believe the work has purpose, that it adds to the positive waves of Creation, waves that may wash a distant shore I'll never see, and break gently into sparkles of a dream, the gentle hiss of hope running up the sand, to light another's eyes, to lift another's heart.
Rock on.
I'm still trying to get up the courage to learn how to use my late husband's big red grill. Thank you.