Word 1

For the past few years I have tried to pick a word in January that I felt would guide my year ahead. It would be a word I hoped would encapsulate my attitudes and actions, what I wanted to do in the next twelve months, as I set resolutions and goals.

Last year I picked more of a thought, a poem that as soon as I heard it - I knew it was exactly where I was in my life:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

"Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown!"

And he replied:

"Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way."

-Minnie Louise Haskins

I felt like I was stepping into something unknown, some darkness that God was lighting a way into. I didn't know what.

Awakening was not the word I picked in 2015 but as the months moved on, I realized that it was the word that best described my life. It kept appearing in my journals, in my heart. I felt like I was awakening from a long slumber, like there were layers of rock being chipped away from around my heart.

Anxiety and worry, perfectionism and feelings of failure had built up these hardened places. Hurry and busyness stifled my creativity and my prayers were all but smoke blown away in the rushing wind of all the things I felt I had to do to live up to some imaginary standard of what God wanted from me.

I began to move again, teaching dance classes to refugee children. I have always hated teaching, never feeling like I was "expert" enough to have anything to offer. These kids bright smiles awakened something in me, reminding me of dance for the pure love it, of how simply creating together connects us beyond borders and differences.

I began to write again, hesitant to call myself "writer." My heart quickly ignited as something dormant in me for so many years found it's way to the forefront, awakening a calling in me I had suppressed for the busyness of life. I had acted like it wasn't there, this dream inside of me. I really just wasn't brave enough to walk into the unknown until I took God's hand and said, "let's go..."

At the end of that year of awakening, I sat in the dim light filtering in through the stained glass windows of the Abbey Church where I always spent my end of the year reflection time. A new word found me. Continue Reading