Crossing a Threshold

December 3, 2022

For a while now I’ve been thinking about the idea of thresholds. This past year has held several for me. In 2022 I turned 65, retired from work that I loved, moved from my 30+ year home in Atlanta across the country to a beach community outside of San Diego, began a new relationship with Lori and started my third chapter. Crossing each of those thresholds rings true to me of the sense/image/awareness of place. Thresholds can be physical locations for us. Sometimes they name and claim unique passages of our lives. They are markers. Placeholders. Thresholds are the outward and visible signs of our moving from here to there. They hold our moments of stepping into and stepping away, of crossing over and crossing back.
 
And in so many ways this notion also represents the sense/image/awareness of time. Thresholds can reveal our life story, moment by moment. Memory by memory. They can tell stories of our beginnings and endings. Moving in and moving out. Boxes carried in and out. Walking into a job and leaving for the last time. Holding a hand and releasing it. They are the snapshots of moments when time raced by and when time stood still. Our greatest joys and deepest sorrows. Our life’s most mundane and most significant instants. They mark how we lived and learned. Crossing those thresholds stand for all the places we’ve been and all the places we are living into. Both.  
 
As our old friend, Jonathan Livingston Seagull said so many years ago, “And in the middle of place and time, can’t we see each other once or twice?”
 
As we are now ending our first week of this Advent season, this first week of preparing, it is good and right that we intentionally move from this time to what is next on our journey. What is next, we really don’t know. Many of us think we know what to expect of this season because we’ve experienced past Advents. But this is our one and only Advent for this time in our lives. We are not who we were five years ago or even five months ago. And `the good Lord only knows’ who we will be in the coming days…And so may we intentionally, heartfully breathe deeply this day and offer our thanks. And when tomorrow comes, as it comes, may we cross the threshold that takes us from here to there. May we enter in with hearts and spirits open for what is yet to be.
 
(Thanks to Janet who has such a great heart for loving the world and for welcoming us to enter in)
 
Prayer
Loving God who was, is and will be we give thanks for your gracious holding of our lives. In our comings and goings, in our stepping in and stepping out, you are there. In laments and alleluias, you are there. Thank you for always being at the heart of this life journey. We are so very grateful. Amen.