Photo by Couleur on Pixaby
In December 2017 we had a house fire. The chimney was compromised and my husband and I woke up that morning early to a smoke filled home. We hurried outside and waited for the fire department to come as we watched our home burn to the ground. We moved in with our daughter’s family during 2018. We had a contractor but we also spent many hours doing some of the projects ourselves. We mourned. We hoped. We practiced patience. We labored. We made lots of decisions. It was a hard year. It was a growth year.
I was thinking about the rings in a tree trunk. The rings tell a story about the growth the tree experienced that year. Growth that came from climate, temperature, rainfall, etc. When the conditions are perfect for the tree, the rings are wider apart. When the conditions aren’t so ideal the rings are much thinner.
2018 was a thin ring year for the Holyoaks. It feels like an oxymoron. We experienced so much growth and expansion that year; it feels like the ring should be huge. The conditions weren’t ideal but our growth was exponential.
I think about other transitions in my life:
Moving the summer before my senior year of high school
Getting married
Having children
Re-entering the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom for 25 years
Homeschooling
Moving four times in my adult life
Becoming Empty Nesters
Some of those experiences felt so hard, so painful while going through them. Coming out on the other side feels so empowering, so amazing.
There is a scripture in Isaiah 61:3 which says “to give unto them beauty for ashes.” That’s what happened to our home. It went from ashes to beauty. And that’s what transitions do for us as humans. They give us an opportunity to grow, to become even more beautiful humans than we were before.
If we let them.
