This morning on my walk I passed a house where the tulips had just finished blooming, and the iris were budded next to them, not yet ready to bloom. I was having a mental conversation with the tulips.
“I bet it’s embarrassing to be hanging out there with your blooms faded and your petals falling off.”
“It’s like you’re saying, “Hey, look at me, I’m a mess.”
“I bet it feels awkward and conspicuous.”
“I bet you feel really unsightly.”
“I bet you wish I would stop staring at you.”
We are in transition in our yards here in the Pacific Northwest. The spring flowers just finished and the early summer flowers have not started to bloom yet. The spent flowers and the leaves are messy and not very attractive.
That’s how our lives are sometimes. Transitions are always a little awkward. We go from a life that we are familiar with to one that is new to us and unfamiliar.
Some transitions come in order and we expect them. That would be like going to college, getting married and starting a family. Some transitions are unexpected like the early death of a spouse or raising your children in the church to have them leave home and leave their faith behind.
How are you supposed to be a widow when you were just getting good at being a wife?
How do you stay close to your children when their lives aren’t anything like you thought they would be – all the milestones have changed?
We see the messiness in our life during a transition. We feel conspicuous, like we’re the only one doing this and everyone is staring at us.
What we often can’t see is that right behind the phase of life we are finishing is another beautiful life just waiting to get going. It’s not the same as the life we just left and, unlike the flowers that bloom in succession without missing a beat, we often must get used to and even practice the new life.
I can help you in your transitions – when you work with me, we laugh together, we cry together, we practice new ways to flourish when our life doesn’t follow the path that we thought it would.
I bet you think it would be nice to have someone alongside you who has done this before.
It is nice. Let’s talk.