Holding the door open
A few months ago, I was listening to my former pastor’s podcast, and he was talking about how everything he studies (and then teaches and writes about) is around one central question: How do people change?
I started thinking about what my central question is. For me, it is: How do we live as integrated people?
Living integrated means holding the disparate pieces of ourselves in tension. It means knowing that, within us and around us, there is the sacred and the profane. It means holding all the wildly incongruous parts of ourselves and finding how they fit together. It means living and loving with your whole heart despite the risks and uncertainty, as Brene would say. And I’m pretty sure it has something to do with being complete as your Heavenly Father is complete, as Jesus would say.
On New Years, I was reading everyone’s beautiful, hopeful, gratitude-filled posts, and I knew I should be feeling all those things, and I could tell you all the reasons I should be feeling all those things, and I was feeling exactly zero of those things.
Granted, I was sick and quarantining the entire holiday season, so I was not exactly in a good place going into 2022. Also, year after year, I feel a vague sense of panic and dread on January 1 when I don’t wake up that morning with vision for the year ahead, despite the fact that, year after year, God shows up and drops it in my lap in time for my birthday five days later.
Anyway — I was digging deep to feel the things and was really not. But somewhere (a book? a podcast? an instagram? I don’t even know because this was my brain when I was sick) I stumbled on someone talking about holding the door open for what’s possible in the year to come. And I thought: yes. I can do that. It feels like the smallest offering, but it feels like all I have.
Over the next few days, though, I started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t the smallest offering. Because holding the door open isn’t accidental; it’s deliberate. It’s a lot like holding your hands open — a posture of surrender, yes, but also expectancy. It’s holding in tension high expectations — hands out — and low attachment to outcomes — palms up. It’s hoping with your body when your heart doesn’t know if it can.
May 2022 be a year of holding the door open for what’s possible — of holding our hands, and our lives, open for the possibility of wholeness and greater integration.
