ethoughts weekly- Issue 142

Jan 2 2007

New Year

The delay in ethoughts weekly is due to the holiday travel, coupled with the bereavement and, memorial service of my stepfather.

It’s amazing how losing someone, even one whom is not a blood relative, can blow a hole wide open in your life. That hole, where that one was, is felt on many levels. At meals this weekend we were sort of lost. We sat around as we realized Jim would sit in the same seat every meal when we were all together. He would pray a similar kind of prayer. It was normal. Now the occasion was absent of his participation, his body, his words.

Pray for my mother. I don’t know what’s it’s like to lose a spouse, but imagine it’s like getting torn in two. You care for someone, they care for you, and then they leave you. You have no hand to hold in the same way. You walk alone. Friends and family enter in. They wrap their arms around you, but they can’t fill that hole in your heart, not really. You have to push through, walk a new kind of path. You have to find out who you are again.

I have high hopes for the New Year, but not because of anything I can truly put my finger on. Maybe I have hope because I love the idea of a new year as a new start. Sure, I know our problems don’t stop when we hang up a fresh calendar. We have no guarantees of health and safety in the year to come, but we do have something I like a lot. We have opportunities. We have, perhaps, new energies to try again, or try anew. We have new seasons coming, both figurative and literal. I always enjoy have possibilities. A new year is 365 days ready for new possibilities. A new year means shutting the door on the low points of the past year. It’s way of wrapping things up, or taking out the trash. I like to clean up once in a while. I have to, really. We all do. Now is the time for that. It may be a time of mourning, for me, and my family, but it is too, a time of change. A change can mean growth. And growth is good. So change, though painful, will reap a harvest.

A sweet woman from my church sent a sympathy card, and a quote to me that was from Martin Luther. It talked about people being seeds. I like that. Seeds are buried. Seeds die in the ground, if you want the truth. But then they are reborn. Seeds produce a harvest. And that’s what we are, seeds. To children of God, death gives way to new life. And I think not just new life to the departed, but for the ones they leave behind. We are all seeds, all the time- dying and being born. Shedding what we are, to be what we will become. And this is the kind of cycle, life offers to us all the time- death, rebirth, and growth, again and again. Over and over we find out what we must shed to be better. We learn what we must leave to grow. And one day, soon for some of us, we shall shed these ailing bodies for ones that will last forever.

May this New Year bring new life in every way to your existence. Peace to you.

Lisa DeLay

©2006