After the Christmas break, I’ve started spending time with my Directee’s again. Some have reflected on the past year telling stories of suffering and difficulty, acknowledging in the telling what a tough year it was. Weariness that those stories are still unfolding and not yet getting any easier.

For many of us our current stories are threaded with powerlessness. We can do nothing to change where we find ourselves on the path, cannot strategise, analyse or rationalise our way to a different place. We simply find ourselves HERE. And HERE is where God too finds herself, right in the midst of it, exactly where we are, present whether we’re aware of that truth or not.

What if in this New Year moment you were to let be what is? To simply be here with your thoughts, feelings, emotions, circumstances and situations, without judging, fixing, analysing or digging a way through. Just being present with God to THIS.

I read a beautiful blessing by Jan Richardson this morning, the beginning of which spoke comfortingly into my HERE place…

WELCOMING BLESSING

When you are lost

in your own life.

When the landscape

you have known

falls away.

When your familiar path

becomes foreign

and you find yourself

a stranger

in the story you had held

most dear.

Then let yourself

be lost.

Let yourself leave

for a place

whose contours

you do not already know,

whose cadences

you have not learned

by heart.

Let yourself land

on a threshold

that mirrors the mystery

of your own

bewildered soul.

What would it be like to let ourselves be lost for a while? To let be what feels unfamiliar and foreign, to find ourselves strangers in our own lives. To simply welcome the mystery and perplexity of the moment. To give voice and space to what is rather than trying to make it into something different with the effort of our own hands?

As we welcome it all, giving voice and space to what is, we also welcome The Divine into it too. We give love, comfort, hope and compassion a place in our bewilderment, our lostness. If we create space and allow time for what is to be, something new will begin to emerge, something more solid, grounded, found, something that though unfamiliar, somehow feels like home. Even when we feel lost and we find ourselves in an unfamiliar place, we are still held in the love and safety of Holy Spirit. By allowing ourselves to be lost we also welcome ourselves to be found again.

The Welcoming Blessing doesn’t end in lostness and I pray that as you read it, you will be comforted, en-couraged and given grace to let what is be, knowing that this isn’t where your story ends…

It will come

as a surprise,

what arrives

to welcome you

through the door,

making a place for you

at the table

and calling you

by your name.

Let what comes,

come.

Let the glass

be filled.

Let the light

be tended.

Let the hands

lay before you

what will meet you

in your hunger.

Let the laughter.

Let the sweetness

that enters

the sorrow.

Let the solace

that comes

as sustenance

and sudden, unbidden

grace.

For what comes,

offer gladness.

For what greets you

with kindly welcome,

offer thanks.

Offer blessing

for those

who gathered you in

and will not

be forgotten—

those who,

when you were

a stranger,

made a place for you

at the table

and called you

by your name.

If you’d like a little more guidance in letting go, welcoming and being with what is, The Welcoming Prayer is so helpful. Here’s a link to an introduction of it I did last year.