I don’t know what you are feeling at this time, after another long year of uncertainty, pandemic weirdness and grief,
but I do know that as we approach the start of a new year, it can be tempting to come up with a whole host of plans and intentions to get tackling all the things that we feel are out of alignment.
I know. I feel it too.
For me, the past few months have been categorised by lethargy, emotional flatness, exhaustion and grief – sparsely punctuated by bursts of excited hope and new ideas.
Ideas which, despite the energy they contain, I’ve barely been able to act upon. Subsequently, the pull to gird my loins and get my head on straight, to make this coming year one of action and energy – is very strong.
However, just because the calendar flicks us over from December 31 to January 1, it doesn’t mean that everything will automatically be very different.
Much of this Christmas holiday I’ve felt drained and exhausted. Yet it has also been a time full of rich family connection and joy. Definitely not a wash out.
But at this point – two days from the start of the new year – I need to remember that I am unlikely to be able to flick a switch in my body or mind, and transform into ‘Super energised-creative-active-brilliant food making- coaching-performing-influencer Mum Woman’.
I mean, some of that is possible, but not in the next two days.
Instead, I can choose to gently ease my way into 2022.
I can take small moments to practice gratitude for all that I have learnt, the ways I have grown and the blessings I have.
I can spend time in the quiet minutes (hard to find in a busy household), and prayerfully lay my exhausted, passionate heart, before a loving and kind God.
A God who is for me, and promises rest for my weary soul.
I can start 2022, not from a place of forced strength and determined dominion, but from a place of quiet, deep surrender. I can offer my humble and frequently broken life, to someone who is able to do far more with it than I can.
Like the Kintsugi potters, who create beautiful things out of broken pottery, God can unite those broken pieces of my life with threads of gold, and create something new, stronger, more beautiful. He can transform me, take my dreams and pain, weaving them into a life more glorious than I could imagine possible.
I don’t know how you are feeling two days before New Year.
Maybe you too, feel worn out and weary.
Are you barely hanging on to flickering hopes and dreams, you once saw so clearly?
If so, perhaps consider laying it all, openly and vulnerably, before a loving God who really sees you, and who cares deeply for you.
Lay those pieces of your life and pain at his feet. Give him permission to reconstruct them with gold, however he sees fit. Watch over the coming year, how you are transformed. See how you deepen into the truer, richer, version of yourself.
You are breathtakingly beautiful – let him reveal that more in you through your weakness.
I will be doing the same.
Here’s to 2022, Happy New Year!
Cassie x
