Five-Minute Friday: Opportunity

I'm back with Lisa Jo and the gang for another year of Five-Minute Friday posts.... The prompt today is "Opportunity."

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words 
await another voice." 

-T. S. Eliot

I've spent the past week, as I often do at this time of year, pondering the turning of one year to the next.  I always thought of it as a new chapter; now I wonder at it being another voice, another language, emerging through the three hundred sixty-five days that fall like sands through this hourglass. 

. . . . . . . . . . 

My husband and I married in April and all but train-wrecked our way through the rest of 2012.  Come the end of the year, not much had changed between us or in our circumstances- but as the clocks turned at midnight, we smiled and danced our way into another year.  A fresh start.

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I woke up New Year's morning and the sun shone bright over white-capped mountains, and the sky was like a frozen pond I could skate across, and I listened for a new song.  But it sounded so much the same as it did, the day before.  This new voice, as with any new language, I think, takes time to form.  Time to settle in and stick in the mind and roll off the tongue and echo across the paper; time for it to surpass the voice of the year before.  

It takes discipline and perseverance and, sometimes, downright stubbornness.

I wish I believed that last year's voice is now a language of the past, entirely different in type and tone and material.  It sounds nice, to shut the door and distance myself from what is but a few days fresh, to brush it off my hands and walk away.  But I'm not convinced that's what the poet meant.  Sometimes, language does not forsake the old but builds upon the best of its foundation.  Something different; maybe even something better. 

. . . . . . . . . .

Throughout last year, a language emerged in a story of vulnerability, struggle, pain, disappointment, grief, darkness, and ultimately, clinging fast to Jesus.  Within this story, a voice of gratitude, grace, courage, feeble faith and glimmers of hope shone through the cracks.  It would be a lie to say these have all gone away; that this voice has changed over completely, when it's all still here, inside me.   The good, the ugly, and everything in process.

Now I get to build on it.

And I thought to myself and asked God, where do you want me to set my sights this year - with discipline, perseverance and stubbornness - to build upon what we began last year?

And it's here, it's this: Joy.

Joy doesn't forsake the old.  Joy moves in and pitches a tent upon its foundation.  Joy refuses to crumble when the ground below is shaking.  Joy flourishes, in dry spells and in floods and everything in between, because joy isn't dependent on the weather or the season.  Joy just is.

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Oh, how I want that.  The very thing I'm starving for and yet afraid to lean out and grasp, for fear it's only an illusion.

So that's where you'll find me leaning this year, friends.  Leaning into the fear, to discover that illusion is a lie.  Leaning into hope of joy in Christ.  Leaning into joy that is untouched by circumstances.  Hoping, in the leaning, to blow on a few other fires in others and kindle some joy and have faith that it will spread.  Because that's what joy does.  It spreads wild and untamed.

And I want to pause and say thank you, for joining with me on this journey, from wherever you are.  Let's raise our glasses and toast - to another year's words awaiting another voice.  And, most of all, to these opportunities for joy.