Finnegan Begin Again

Life flows in seasons.  They are somewhat predictable, summer, winter, spring, fall.  Childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, senior citizen.  You know it is coming, you can expect each season to bring its own branding iron, leaving a mark that in some way, insignificant or mind blowing, impacts the travelers as they journey on.  Stories repeat, you begin to hear the same elements in the words that are spoken to and around you, it begins to be comfortable and even natural.

Then something changes.  Its not the season so much as the traveler.  One day you wake up and your skin doesn't fit any more.  A lot of tugging, adjusting, wiggling, ignoring, covering up, and decorating takes place trying to make your skin feel like it did just the night before.  But it doesn't.  There is a season of denial, an expectation that your skin is just on vacation and in a day or two at most, you will wake up and it will all feel normal again.  Then comes anger, frustration, resentment, fear.  Tug, tug, tug.  One day you wake up and look at yourself and discover there are a few places where you can see that you like some of the new skin you are in.  In a few spots, it might even be better skin than you had before.   It even feels a little, you know, good in places.  More time passes, a season or two, and you really can't imagine how you ever lived without the skin you are in now.

Then something changes.  Why?  Is this journey really about seasons, learning to love your skin, embracing the journey, or perhaps even learning to grieve loss?  Is God leading us on, over, around, through?  Are we being stretched, shrunk, dry cleaned, enlarged or expanded?  In the moments of sheer panic and overwhelming fear, are we learning free fall, or fully relying on God, or are we just so plaguing slow that we don't get that this same old comfortable skin wasn't meant to get us through the whole journey?

Yeah, and one more question.  If this is the way we were meant to grow in grace and love with God and others,why is it that we don't recognize  the symptoms in our fellow travelers?  Why don't we help one another recognize that it is simply time to begin again?  Why, after so many pilgrims have made this journey, are we still discovering anew, sometimes in isolated misery, that we don't call the shots on this trip?  We don't choose to begin again, a new beginning is given to us.  We can sit, arms and legs crossed, refusing to budge, but it changes nothing.  A new beginning is our only option, unless of course we just chose not to move.  To me, that is no choice at all.

So Finnegan begins again.  All to the glory of God.