Jan 24 2021 A new journey begins

I have been absent in my regular writing for a while. This is a function of the holidays, fatigue, and a sense that I was writing for the wrong reasons.

In late October, my loved one was increasingly symptomatic, and ended up in the hospital for the month of November. I’ve recently been thinking about how unnerved we become when a friend or loved one has to go to the ER, or is admitted to the hospital for a day or two. For someone to be in the hospital for a week indicates something serious. And yet, my loved one was hospitalized for a concurrent month in November, over three months in total during 2020, with seven separate admittances. It’s easy to become numb to how sick that really is, unless I remember how upset I’d be if my husband was hospitalized for a week. Three plus months is very sick indeed.

The months of December and January have been mostly lovely, with increasingly symptomatic behavior. The nature of this illness is that there will always be periods of relative health, followed by decompensation, illness, and subsequent hospitalization, stabilization, and health. Repeat.

When I’m in the midst of one of those transitions, from health to illness or from illness to health, it has become too easy to turn my morning prayer, reflection and writing time into nothing more than a place to process the illness and its effect on my family. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but once we hit a relatively stable few months, I didn’t have the prompt of changing health conditions to prompt writing. But that’s not where my writing started. I started as a place and way to reflect and pray. And so I’m returning to that, because I need it for me.

And to switch things up a little bit, my prompts for the next year will not be my regular Morning Prayers, although I’ll continue with those prayers (as a benefit of working for the bishop!). Rather, I’m going to commit to work my way through a book that I’ve had for a few years, and never finished. The Daily Bible: Read, Meditate and Pray Through the Entire Bible in 365 days. There are plenty of versions of this kind of book, and this one uses the translation most often used in my tradition (New Revised Standard Version), and is chronological; I’ll start in Genesis and end with Revelation. After the prescribed reading, there’s a reflective writing from some theologian, and some questions to ponder.

It’s impossible to not slip into reflections about my loved one and my life, as that’s the context from which I ponder. But I have something concrete and outside my own head to serve as a starting place. 

This morning, I"m thinking about journeys, beginnings, and starting over. It's been a huge lesson for me to realize that it's ok to stop doing something I'd started when it wasn't working. Stopping doesn't mean failure. Failure happens when you let the pause prevent you from starting again. So here I start again.  

So if you’ve ever thought about reading your way through the Bible, either for the first time, your 100th time, or in the company of others, join me. We can reflect together, lament together, celebrate together, or trudge our way through some of the more challenging bits of Scripture. And if you want to read the same book as me, here’s a link to the Ebook. My journey begins tomorrow.