Bye, Bye Familiar. Hello, Grace!

 Wouldn't you agree, friend, that life has felt like anything but normal for the last bit of time? Nobody on this earth-planet exists who hasn't had their world upended in some fashion during the last eighteen months. Some lost jobs, some lost dreams. Others lost loved ones. And everyone everywhere lost precious milestones, experiences, connections. We've mourned that. Wished it were different. Longed for what we once had. 

And yet, isn't this also just the latest challenge to interrupt our lives? Aren't we always confronting some sort of interruption or invasion that tries to tell us in the moment that things will never get better? That God is no longer good? That we are forgotten, left alone, hopeless? 

I realize that every single one of us clings to our own version of what "familiar" or "normal" looks and feels like. We envision a certain life we want to live in a certain place with certain people and certain experiences and opportunities and, when things turn out differently, we feel like we grieve something that went wrong. We struggle to let go of the image in our soul that we felt so sure about that now is no longer possible. We doubt if we will ever find the joy, love, and purpose we once thought we had. If we can ever re-discover what we now feel we were robbed of. 

Upended, we question who we are. where we're going. what we're about. 

We feel ignored. denied. 

Seriously... who hasn't felt such a thing at some point?! A global pandemic is only the latest thing to crash into our worlds uninvited and unannounced, wrecking us all and changing who we are forever. We may feel like these are unprecedented times which, in a way, they are. But the thoughts, the feels? Those are always surfacing. Always coming to the forefront anytime we are in a difficult and unexpected upheaval. 

Yet, I'm starting to see that it's impossible to move on, go forward if you can't say goodbye to whatever "familiar" looked like for you. If you can't say "so long" to your version of "normal," you can't welcome and step into whatever is next. Hold on too tightly, and you'll break. Fail to bend. Fail to grow. 

Life asks us to say goodbye a lot. We never like it...and why should it be pleasant? Saying farewell to anything or anyone is hard!! But I'm also understanding that the key to resilience is choosing not to stay stuck on the goodbye but to say hello to Grace. 

Wave adieu to your personal ideas of what life should look like, and you suddenly make room for something or someone new to step in. Not that the farewell is easy, but the removal is part of shaking up your world in order for God to do something more. Because He always IS more. 

When you begin to look at all transitions and losses this way, you turn your face toward what you're opening up to instead of just what you're walking away from. In every situation, you can choose where to focus.

 In all honesty, I can assure you that whatever "familiar" looks like for you will be, at some point, changed and un-done. Nobody's life looks exactly as they always wanted and that's part of the adventure and the challenge of it. If everything always turned out just like we'd hoped, there would never been room for something different and surprising to emerge. We would never discover hope if the pain of turning away after watching something end didn't happen. 

But what can flip our perspective in those times we face circumstances like this is the choice to say "Hello, Grace! Thank You for being here. I'm glad to know I have You with me in moments such as these and I know that this is only a temporary re-direction toward something better. Help me welcome this with open arms and call this a gift, even though it hurts." 

That is what the power of choosing is all about! Doesn't mean you won't struggle to turn loose. Doesn't mean you won't lick your wounds for awhile over what switched. But it does mean that you will know what you still have even in the face of such loss and transition. Grace remains and is always the same even when so much never stays the same. And that is the truth that holds firm in all our days for always - He is here...God with us...no matter where we are. Always redeeming, always restoring. 

When you have nothing left, you have Him. Grace-sufficient. Emmanuel. Forever.