Encouragement for the Space Between

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Can I tell you a secret?

This week between Christmas and New Year is my favorite week of the year. The world feels like it gets just a little bit quieter. Like fresh falling snow softens the noise around. It’s a time to savor and celebrate the goodness of the year.

Hard things and good things can both be true at the same time.

I guess you could call this a ritual of sorts. I wander through the scenes of the year that is fading out of sight. Tuck them away. Remember their lessons. And then look forward to the year that is coming waving excitedly around the bend.

Sitting curled up on my couch in north Florida, I am doing what I often do this week. I’ve turned off most of my social media, silenced my phone, and I’m giving myself permission to just be in this liminal moment.

You have permission to stop, to slow, to give yourself what you need.

Meaning happens in the space between.
In the pause between words.
In the margins, not just the middle.
At the edges and corners of things.

The maybes.
The perhapses.

Without the space between, there would be no words, no stories. No time. No growth. No rhyme or music. No art. No iambic pentameter. No us. No family. No movement. No soufflés or marshmallows or lattes.

They all become in the space between.

So if this finds you not quite where you want to be to greet this bright, shiny, new calendar year… If the ticking clock feels more like a tapping finger ready to frustratedly point out all the places you feel stuck.

I wonder what it might feel like to realize we are here and that is enough.

This moment is enough.

Maybe, beloved, we aren’t stuck at all.

We are simply in the in-between.

Where all the everything we need is already unfolding.

All we have to do...

Is breathe.

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And as you breathe, what inspires, breathes into you as you give yourself permission to be right where you are?

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Know someone who might be encouraged by these words? Please feel free to share.