Tomorrow our daughter will spend part of the day shadowing another student at what soon will become her new school. Tomorrow she will begin to imagine herself as a seventh grader - negotiating the new teachers, new spaces, new peers, and new subjects of junior high school. Of course she'll return to her sixth grade classroom for several more weeks, but it won't be the same once she begins to imagine the promises and pitfalls the future holds. My imagination has been working overtime in reverse - the art projects and homework, fractions and fossil-hunting field trips, concerts and conferences of elementary school. I have not forgotten her first day of kindergarten when, as scared and fiercely independent as she is today, she turned and forcefully whispered, "Can you leave now?" The world was wobbly that day too - so full of both possibilities and loss as she left us standing in the doorway to walk into her new life.
A new school, a new job, a new relationship or one that ends, a devastating diagnosis, a great victory, a crushing disappointment -- loose, wobbly moments when who we are and who we will be can suddenly part ways, moving in new directions.
My prayers on a day that feels a little too wobbly are many: for young people looking for identity and belonging, for college graduates searching for work in an unwelcoming job market, for adult children holding the hand of a dying parent, for spouses who double as caregivers, for those who have decided to let cancer run its course untreated, for couples taking steps toward the altar and marriage. I am grateful for a God whose love is steadfast in the midst of uncertainty, whose spirit moves into the loose spaces that change creates and for those who help us to find our footing.
thank you so much. this resounds for me today.
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