Living with Intention In Times of Worry
It’s the new year, a time of renewed goals, new possibilities, celebrations of survival for another year. It is also, often, the time when we make far too many resolutions. Then those all overwhelm us until we abandon them, settling back into the ruts of our usual lives… Maybe that’s just me? I’m finding that in the wake of the holidays, there’s a real challenge ahead of us.
What does it look like to live with intention and to set goals in the midst of a world where things change so severely every few days?
• How do our teachers teach? What can they expect when they might be online or in person? What happens when they can’t tell from day to day if they’ll have 14 students or 30? If they will be playing catch up or supporting another grade and classroom at any given moment?
• How can our learners learn? What are the added challenges when they might be missing pieces of the puzzle or forced to retake assessments late? Where are the impacts felt when COVID absences interrupt schooling? What about when there’s a lack of adequate support forcing another movie day or a change of syllabus? What changes must we be open to as people face illness as a regular part of life?
• How would anyone make plans when unpredictability seems to be the only constant of our lives?
These are some questions facing us as we move into a month of “living with intention” as a congregation. But they are not new questions. Until vaccinations and antibiotics became widespread in the last century, deadly disease was simply a fact of life. It has only been a few generations that we could assume that we’d be mostly healthy most of our lives. Less than 100 years have passed since we began to make plans for months and years into the future, with confidence that we would be able to keep our plans intact. Yet in all that time, people didn’t live lives of chaos or fail to plan for the future. Instead, humans lived with a well-developed sense of hope and possibility.
As I look around, I suspect that we need that again these days. We need to find potential for joy, and hope for the future beyond our plans and certainties. We need to be looking for that which might and can be amongst the many things that may not continue. Perhaps we will not be in person, but we can find community. We cannot worship indoors, but we hope to meet around a fire or on a patio outside. There, we will find joy and sacred moments anyhow.
Even when nothing that has been planned happens as we expected, I urge you to look toward your values. You could remind yourself of a few ways you are still living with what you believe held in your thoughts. I urge you to go outside, or dive deep into a book or an art project this month. Remind yourself that you can find beauty, experience the miracle of creation, and create something worthy. Yes, life is unpredictable. However, even in the midst of brokenness and chaos, there is still so much that is good. May we set the intention to simply find it in our everyday living. May it be enough.
