Find the newness you’re looking for
It’s a new year, but you're not new.
God might be doing new things, but God does them through you, through your lived in, well used, loved up, messy life. All of it. Nothing is excluded; everything is drawn into the experience. You build your life on top of everything you are.
Your new normal is something you flow into, more than something you find.
As much as you can anyway, considering that normal is highly subjective, and when God said God would do something new, in Hebrew that meant that God does the holy work of restoring and returning and renewing - bringing us and the world and all of us together back home to ourselves, and to each other. There aren't whiz-bang clean slates being made all over the place. God creates things with our lived-in, used up, old lives. We are the building blocks. We are the river. We participate in newness by showing up and being brave.
You can't really find that, as much as you flow with it.
Isaiah said that God said:
"Be alert, be present. I'm about to do something brand-new. It's bursting out! Don't you see it? There it is! I'm making... rivers in the badlands." *
The wondrous thing about a river is that the same body of water is constantly changing, constantly touching new shores, constantly gathering more from the earth below it and the sky above it and the creation around it. You can meet the same river in different spots, and yet it's not the same at all. The water you see flow by you will never flow by that way again. It moves forward and onward, surrendered to the current, going where it leads - the same, but always changing and becoming.
Your life will always be your life. You will always be you, but each shore that you touch will see a different version of you, a becoming and changing you, one that's gathered from the earth below you, the sky above you, and the creation around you as you lived your way here.
Sometimes, when you're in the badlands, when you're in a bind and you feel as though you can't move, the best thing you can do is surrender. Fall into grace and let it carry you downstream.
Flow with it.
Richard Rohr said:
"Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it."
Rilke said:
"May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children."
It's not so much that "you go with the flow," that you give up your agency and empowerment and sense of self-responsibility, but that you become the flow.
When you're in flow, you're as close to life as you can get. It's a place of realness and vulnerability, joy and learning. There's a sense of ease, even when trouble and strife comes, because you know you can't force your way through, you can only work with what you've got, you can only rely on the wisdom and wonder of grace to get you through. When you know you need a miracle, you stop striving, and you believe, and you live like you do.
The thing with rivers is that they nourish you, cleanse you, they keep you cool and calm. The thing with water is that it's the softest material on earth, and yet, it carves its way effortlessly through rock. It just keeps showing up. It just keeps flowing. It greets each new shore with humility and expectation as it flows, flows, flows its way through.
When you find yourself in the badlands, longing for something more, surrender to the river, let it keep you moving, let it take you on to new shores.
Mindful Prompt: You are safe in the rhythm and flow of ever-changing life. Faith is a living thing. It moves and flows and grows and becomes. Surrender to the movement, flow with grace.
Continued in the series "Your New Normal", this week with a subscription in the App.
Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco
* Isaiah 43:19
