Do you find transitions challenging?

For some reason, I’ve often found the week between Christmas and New Year’s disorienting.

Perhaps it’s because we generally pivot from focusing on the fullness, frills, and details of the Christmas season—to the stark freshness of a new year.*

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the season of Advent, and I love and welcome Christmas too. Though holidays can sometimes bring up a strange grief, I find I can never get over the message of “God with Us.” Additionally, I value the invitation to reflect, try again, and see the opportunity of a new year before us.

But transitions aren’t always easy, are they?

For some of us, particularly trauma survivors, transitions have meant losing that which we have held most dear. Sometimes transitions have equated to a loss of safety. Sometimes transitions have meant being unable to grieve what needed to be grieved. For some, transitions have not signalled goodness coming, but more pain.
So it makes sense that “newness” does not always equate to excitement for everyone. As a trauma therapist, I can’t say enough how valid this is; how much honouring the reality of our experience matters.

And yet, as we are able, perhaps we can keep our eyes open to a truth that holds all other's truths: even in our disorientation, even in our pain—we are held and Loved by the God of the universe. And in many ways, this can serve as a tether to help us find our way forward.

Though I don’t celebrate pain, the potential gift of disorientation is that it opens us up in a way we may not experience when we are deeply committed to a current way of existing. Celtic Christianity has long discussed the realities of “thin places;” moments or spaces in which the line between heaven and earth feels blurred. There is something fascinating and acutely spiritual about the distance between the 25th of December and New Year’s Day—perhaps it is a thin place.

Perhaps it’s a space where we can honor precisely where we are, with all our unfinishedness, grief, and hope. But also the sacredness of where we are going. May it be so. If it feels like a resource, I invite you to:

Inhale: 
God, as I am able,

Exhale:
May I stay tethered to Hope

*Of course, the church calendar has long accounted for this in that Christmastide was originally meant to be celebrated as a 12 day feast.

Written by: @aundikolber

From this week’s series, "The Soft and Fierce Way Through", with a subscription, in the App.