In search of a punchline

So, another year is nearly over.

Do the years go by in the blink of an eye for you, Lord? Being outside time, what does it look like to you? Do you see us rushing about like ants? Always unaware of how much time we have left. Still searching, hurrying, trying to fit in all the things we want to fit in before some unknown deadline...

What a year it's been. I don't know whether to do a review of the year, or to look forward expectantly to the next one, or just have a bit of a ramble about New Year's Eves past and present - I guess I'll end up doing all of them, being a fairly introspective, slightly obsessive sort of person, but one thing has become clear to me over the course of this turbulent year and I wanted to run it past you.

I feel as if at the end of the year there should be some sort of momentous conclusion, some punchline, but there isn't, is there? It just sort of goes on.

The way that time is broken up into years is only our construct, isn't it? For you, regarding us, your creations, the span of time that matters is our lifetime; and that's only because you know how long that is. We don't. I don't honestly know if this coming year will be my last on earth or whether I'll still be here wittering away in another three or four decades. Perish the thought, hey?

At the beginning of this year I told you very earnestly that I had a sense that it was going to be a significant year. You smiled indulgently. Most of the way through the year I was still thinking that there was a point to it - a lesson to learn, or something to do, something to understand.  Although I think that I was partly right in thinking that, because there have been a myriad of lessons and ideas to absorb this year - what has dawned on me is that there is no end to the ride until you decide that It's Over.

Just as today ends and tomorrow begins whether there are fireworks and Big Ben strikes or not, the journey doesn't end because the year does.

Yes, we mark out our time with dates, festivals, hinges in a year so that we can stop momentarily, maybe; so that we can pause and get our breath back. Maybe that's it. Maybe we need to build in some things to look forward to. Maybe we need to reflect.

New Year is all about reflecting, it seems to me. It always makes me look back on a year and look forward to the new one. This time last year I was full of excitement and anticipation. I 'knew' that something was afoot - I sensed that you had something in store for me but naively I thought that it was something to do with 2011 and vaguely I thought that the something would be complete by the end of the year.  Now, on 31 December, I can honestly say that I did know that something was afoot. I was right. Something was. You have a plan for me, and this year not only have I had the penny-dropping moment when I realised that it was so, but I have begun to take a couple of little tiny baby steps towards it, with your help. That might not sound like much of an achievement for a whole twelve-month period but, God, you know how momentous it's been for me!

So, yes, I am going to look back on my year and try to distil what I've learned from it. I'll do that because, as someone pointed out to me recently, I am a 'completer/finisher' or something like that and I am obsessed with details and I like things wrapped up. It has to be done properly. I will also look ahead to a completely new, as yet pristine year ahead and try to determine what of this year I want to take with me and what I'd like to leave behind in the smoke and debris of 2011.

What I want most to do, though, is learn how to pause more regularly. To stop and watch and listen and learn to hear you. To reflect on a daily basis (is that too ambitious?) - anyway, more often then just once a year.

Ha.

I feel all smiley. Just thinking about the potential and the hope and the promise of going forward with you holding my hand and showing me where to go. This year has been hard but it's been wonderful and I want to go a bit further, please. You know what I'm capable of. Show me, so that I know too. Is that alright?

I want to praise you, Lord. For the snow and the blossom and for Easter and the sunshine and the seaside and the falling leaves and the Christmas story. For your constancy and ingenuity and beauty and mercy. I could go on and on.

Thankyou for the company we've had this evening. For fun and laughter and small children staying up beyond their bedtimes having had too much sugar. Thankyou for friendship and love and for the wonderful people you've arranged around me that teach me, inspire me, support me and care for me. It's a gift of such generosity and these people are so, so precious to me. Thankyou for my husband and a glass of champagne and a comfy sofa. I might not make it till midnight tonight but I will go to bed happy.

Thankyou for this year, Lord God. Thankyou that I survived it, that those I love are still around me and in pretty good health, and that you have never left my side; that you never, ever will. Thankyou for looking after me, for listening to me, for humouring me, for playing with me, for answering me, for loving me. For all the blessings that you've so generously given me. For all the glimpses and the revelations and the questions and the wonders.

Thankyou, my Father.

Here's to starting all over again, a bit further on, in a different place.

Cheers.

Restore my soul

Evening, Lord.

I found this:

Not Psalm 23

The clock is my dictator, I shall not rest,

It maketh me lie down only when exhausted.

It leads me to deep depression,

it hounds my soul.

It leads me in circles of frenzy

for activity's sake.

Even though I run frantically from task to task,

I will never get it all done.

For my 'ideal' is with me,

Deadlines and my need for approval,

they drive me.

They demand performance from me,

beyond the limits of my schedule.

they anoint my head with migraines,

and my in-tray overfloweth.

Surely fatigue and time pressure shall follow me all 

the days, hours and minutes of my life,

And I will dwell in the bonds of frustration 

forever.

Marcia K Hornok

I think that either Ms Hornok knew that one day I would read this, or you did. How reassuring to realise that I'm not on my own. If I'd had the words I could have put this together myself. Not because I am constantly active, always on the move - on the contrary, I can laze around with the best of them - but I just don't seem to be able to manage stillness.  Silence.  Rest. I can sleep (oh yes, I am very good at it, given the chance) but rest in you, Lord; I seem to find it so hard. I am always doing. My To Do list runs to several pages and some things have been on there for years. When I do stop, I seem to fill every quiet moment with noise, even just the noise of my own mind. 

I don't know why I seem to resist that stillness, the silence - the other week when I had a day's silent retreat it turned out to be a wonderful, rich, relaxing day that fed my soul. I must learn to find that focus on my own.

I have so many things started but not finished. So many projects 'on the back burner', so many things that I'm involved with because I didn't say no, and I thought that something was expected of me. I worried what people thought of me. I'm getting better at that. I am better than I was six months ago. I know that I want to be needed and I want to be liked. I want people to approve of me and I get in terrible trouble by letting this motivate me rather than what I suspect is the right, appropriate, sensible thing to do. 

I am tired all the time. Physically tired, yes, but this goes with the territory if you have two small children; I would like to have this go away but I know that I might have to wait a few years. I'm mentally tired from the internal gymnastics I do so regularly to keep people happy, to do the things I've said I'll do, to try to fit it all in without ever taking time to recharge; lie down in my green pasture and soak up your presence. 

I am going to sort this out. It might be in baby steps, and I might climb ladders and slip down snakes, but I am going to sort this out. It's taken me oh so very long to identify the problem, but hey, I am going to overlook the fact that I'm late to this party and embrace the fact that I got here at all. 

Lord, you are my Shepherd. I want to lie down in the green pastures, by the still waters, looking up at the blue sky and white clouds, feel the gentle breeze in my hair and hear the whisper of the tall grass. I want to lie down and inhale you; lean against you and feel your strength and warmth and life.  

Restore my soul.

Where did my babies go?

Oh God, What an emotional day it's been.

My little girls.
Not so little as it turns out.

An emotional week, to be honest, but at least today I have an excuse for being emotional as it's my youngest daughter's first morning at school. The rest of the week has seen me all over the place for a whole variety of reasons but today it's because I took both my daughters to school and instead of coming away again with one of them I left them both behind. They both have coat pegs with their names above them, places in the classrooms with their names on and book bags with their names on with new reading books. 

That reminds me, I forgot to write Katy's name in her coat. How did the world keep turning today...?

Pause. Right. All done.

My baby is now at school. Her eyes were so big this morning and just starting to fill with tears when I left her in the classroom and she was having a worry that she wouldn't be able to run fast enough at playtime. She expertly dealt with a dot to dot boat and was setting about colouring it when we left and she didn't watch us leave. I looked back enough times. Two minutes later when I dashed back to check with her teacher what time I was to pick her up (only mornings this week) she was concentrating on her colouring and looked perfectly peaceful and collected. 

Unlike me. There's other stuff going on at the moment that is overwhelming me but I am quite sure that it's the emotional milestone of Katy's start at school that has left me in bits. This morning I felt as if I was falling apart. 

Thankyou, Father, for the delight on Katy's face when she came running over to me at lunchtime with her eyes shining and her new book bag flying. Thankyou that she had a good morning and she has mastered the simple few words in her story books straight away. She was dancing round the living room shouting, 'I can read! I can read!' and just couldn't wait for Lizzie to come home so that she could demonstrate her new literary prowess.  Just now (after school) the two of them have been sitting heads together reading their books (of course, Katy's took minutes to complete but Lizzie's books are much more involved and Kate struggled to stay attentive despite the increasingly dramatic narration). I am so proud of my girls and I want to thank you, Lord God, from the bottom of my heart that you seem to have given them both a love of reading. 

Reading is something that is so precious to me. I don't know what I would do if I could no longer read. I read to learn - every stage of my life is charted by my bookshelves; books about everything I've ever needed to understand and many more. I read for entertainment and I read to escape. I've been brought up in a house full of books and my house is just the same. I love it. I love books. My Mum was a librarian and she met my Dad at the library. 

Mum and Dad always used to tell me that once I could read I need never be bored, and I've found it to be true.  Long journeys, waiting rooms, bedtime, when unable to sleep, whenever I get a minute I always turn to reading. I have a pile of books on the go at any one time and a shelf full waiting to be read. Now I can read on my iPhone, on the computer - Bryan has a Kindle so he can carry round an immense library without needing to turn a page.  I'm not sure I'm ready to grasp such technology yet but I can see that it might be the way forward as we're running out of shelf space.

Lord, thankyou for books. Thankyou for wise people who wrote down their wisdom so that I can read it centuries later. The Bible. Thankyou for people who wrote down stories just to take me out of my life for a time so that I can be someone else and experience things in my imagination that make the world a bigger place. Thankyou for the teachers who taught me this most valuable of skills and thankyou for parents that encouraged me and made me understand the value of it. Please help me to do the same for my daughters and not be impatient or too perfectionist with their attempts. 

So Katy started school today and Lizzie is in Top Class and on Monday for the first time I shall have both my girls at school full time. I shall walk them to school, settle Elizabeth in Red class then take Katy to the other end of the corridor to Purple class and settle her there. Then I shall leave them both behind and have no babies to go home to. 

People keep asking me what I'm going to do with my time and the answer is that I don't know. Not 'I don't know' in a lost and worried sort of way, as I feel very positive about having some time. I know how blessed I am to be in the position of having some time, and I know how fragile this blessing is at the moment for us. When I say that I don't know, I mean that I really don't know. I don't know whether I should get a job, try to write something, volunteer somewhere, learn DIY (which in the current financial climate in our house has to stop meaning, 'Delegate It Yourself' and get a bit more traditional: alas at the moment neither of us could put up a shelf to save our lives)  or catch up on six and a half years of inadequate sleep and shirked housework and so on. The sleep bit sounds really attractive...

I can go to the supermarket on my own and not have to push around a small child in the trolley or be prevailed upon to buy small cars or too much salami.

Whoa. The mind boggles. 

No, the truth is that I really don't know. I've been asking for a while, Lord God, and either you're keeping shtum or I'm not tuned into the right wavelength because I still don't know. If you're waiting for me to step out in faith somehow I'd dearly love to know which direction. I'm trying to listen, if you're trying to tell me something? 

My littlest girl is off to school and I can't help but think that an era is over. How did it get to this stage so fast? It's not five minutes since I was breastfeeding round the clock and exhausted. Next I was holding the hand of a toddler and exhausted. Then they were preschoolers and the clue was in the title at that stage but still it shocks me that the time has come. 

I should have made more of the time while I had it. I should have played with the girls more while I had the chance before they were at school all the time. I should have been more creative, more energetic, more dynamic. At the very least I should have sat and snuggled on the sofa more while they watched children's telly. Now they're at school and those days are gone. No more chances. I feel as if I've spent years wishing time away and now I want it back. My little girls are so grown up these days and the time is flying. Help me make the most of it all. They'll be leaving home before I know it and will they come back? Will I get the chance to help them with their babies or will they live miles away and only visit occasionally? 

That is the worst bit of long range worrying I've done for a while. Sorry. 

So Kate starts school. She came home today having loved her day and was so excited. She read, she coloured, she played, she didn't have any problems running around the playground. She saw Big Sister who was doing something with a parachute in the hall and Big Sister waved to her which made her day. She has a peg with her name on and a place at a table with her name on and a book bag with her name on and she doesn't seem to mind that they all say 'Katherine' instead of Katy - her Best Name, as she calls it. 

My little girls. Big School. The next step in growing up. 

What's my next step, Lord?  Is there a peg with my name on it in a new place?