“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
~Isaiah 43:19

My mother was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky—an “army brat” who grew up all over the world. Literally my mother attended 13 different schools in 12 years! My mom’s side of the family is nomadic by nature. My family is often moving and traveling the world. So even though I lived in just one small city in Ohio from birth until college, I grew up with the family stories of being on the move. To visit most of our family we needed to travel long distances. My grandmother was an expert at packing up a suitcase, a car, a house. (And yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to pack, obviously!) Grandma Mary shared her wisdom, teaching me how to pack my bags and the car before going off to college and making that journey from Ohio to North Carolina.

These are the family stories and memories on my mind this week.
How would you say you navigate change and life’s transitions?

There’s a famous book by William Bridges called Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. He asks us to consider how we tend to act at the end of an evening at a friend’s home. Do we try to “keep the party going” and start new conversations or new activities when folks seem to want to leave? Do we say, “Well, this was great!” and then dash out as quick as we can? Do we formally say goodbye to everyone or just quietly leave on our own with no formal goodbyes at all?

The point is that we all have styles of endings. Bridges writes, “However you learned to deal with them, endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness before ‘life’ resumes an intelligible pattern and direction. The third phase is that of beginning anew.”*

Our faith has something to say about transitions too.

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
~Isaiah 43:19

Love,
Pastor Lauren

* William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, pg. 16.
Photo by Syahrin Seth on Unsplash

Thursday Thoughts 5/7/26