The future is yet to be created. T4:11.1

P1030133Rain just started falling. And stopped. A car goes by. It’s Sunday morning. I wait. I’m waiting for the silence between cars. While I wait the rain starts again. And stops. lt’s as if it’s mimicking the cars. Then there it is, almost before it registers, a moment filled with silence. Then thunder. A lovely breeze. Near silence again. Thunder again.

I’ve been aware of the intermittent and the transitional lately. July flew by like today’s breeze. But the two transitional months that bookend it have stretched to the max. Having my grandson with me, June was the leaving of school and the settling into summer; August the leaving of summer and preparing for school. In transitional times, you don’t know what life will bring and you’re aware you don’t know what life will bring. I think these times get elongated because of that awareness. You’re excited. Expectant. Hopeful. Nervous. The anticipation! In mere days, life will be new. New! Who knows what’s on the horizon?

Today is my daughter Mia's birthday. Here she is showing my grandson Jack the new edition of ACOL

Today is my daughter Mia’s birthday. Here she is showing my grandson Jack the new edition of ACOL

A Course of Love: Combined Volume, has an official publishing date of September 1, which, this year, is Labor Day, the day before the first day of school for a good portion of the United States and maybe other countries as well. At first this didn’t seem like a great day to me.  But now, I feel that a time when so many children, young adults, parents, teachers and administrators are standing on the edge of newness, has to be a time of good energy for a new publication. Instead of “thinking you know” how life will go, you exist at such times, in between, in a pause, open to the newness.

When I wrote the Love book of The Grace Trilogy, (the start of my spiritual journey, shared with two friends), I said, “As ordinary women, we were used to our lives proceeding in an orderly fashion, to having the kind of years difficult to discern from any other year. The unusual years were just that: unusual. We might remember the year we got married, be able to place our state of mind by remembering the years in which our children were born or some other major event took place. “Oh, yes, that was the year . . .””

When we began to review, to think of telling our story, it was then that we realized what an unusual year we had lived. Sometimes a month felt like a year. A day, even an hour, could change us irrevocably. When we got together recently we each were saying, “I wouldn’t be who I am, my life wouldn’t be what it is today, without that time we spent together.” The experiences we shared were, for me, like a prelude to the coming of A Course of Love. The newness just kept continuing on.

One of the things that feels new about A Course of Love (even if it isn’t so new if you think biblically) is that it takes us to the mountain top but returns us to level ground. The cyclical nature of “life on the ground” goes on alongside “life in the spirit” or whatever you want to call the deep inner earthquakes that flash in and out of “usual” life and make for the “unusual,” the unexpected, the extraordinary.  I love it. I love it that I could never in my wildest imaginings have predicted for myself the life that I have. I love every reminder that the future is yet to be created.

“Many predictions of the future have been made, and many of them have been called prophecy. But the future is yet to be created.” T4:11.1