The End

The end… it will never happen again. The end… it brings me such sadness… a death, the end of a life. The end… of a relationship, of a trip to a new land, of a job, of mothering young children, of a dream.

The sadness that comes over me, when saying goodbye and not knowing if I’ll see the person again can be overwhelming.

The end. What’s this? It’s not… the end?

Someone told me that with every ending, there is a new beginning. Could they possibly know something I do not yet know? When Grandma died, she left this world five days before Christmas. It was, for me, as a 12-year-old, a terrible ending… one that took me over forty years to grieve, feeling overwhelmed with sadness, every time I thought of her. Yet, with full, deeper grieving, came acceptance and the ability to celebrate her life and memories of her and a realization that her spirit of love is with me always… a new beginning of life in the spirit, apart from the body, for her… and a new beginning for me to celebrate her life, rather than to constantly be overwhelmed with sadness and grief.

I’ve slowly begun to realize that when I experience the end of something, I need to pause and to wait… to let the end be… and allow the sadness to flow and the acceptance to grow and when the tears, as if raindrops, fall gently on the soil of my soul… something new pops up… unexpected. I have found that, if I continue to hold on to the old and dead thing, I will never have hands ready to grasp the new.

Last year, after attending two churches every Sunday for over eight years and church for practically all of my life, I sensed God wanting me to stop attending both churches completely and just spend the time with Him alone and in His word, walking and talking with Him on walks outdoors. It was weird for me… and different… a type of ending and I didn’t know how long it would last. It went on for months… almost a year… and then, I began thinking how nice it would be to go somewhere for Christmas. A postcard arrived in the mail inviting me to a new church that was to meet at a nearby school. I went and it has truly been a new beginning for me… with new, innovative ways of reaching people right where they are, hearing God’s word in ways that touch the heart and soul, vivid experiences of realities of life, shared through video clips, drama, and word pictures, and meeting people who are real and genuinely caring and not just stuffy or overly intellectual.

It is truly a new beginning that could only happen by reaching the end… and waiting patiently for something new to begin.

Precious Linda, c. 2012