Hello, Bridgetown, and those of you joining us online, my name is Bethany, and this is the Bridgetown Daily for Thursday, March 11th.

I don't know about you, but I continue to feel the fatigue of the last year, to feel the weight of the tides that have changed over and over again.

And while we're well into 2021, it seems that change continues to be the name of the game.

Though things seem as though they're on their way back to being normal or a new normal, there are still many thresholds that we as individuals and as a society will have to cross.

Reemerging, rebuilding, and re-envisioning life will demand that we change.

We will have to again transition from one state to another, and that particularly for those of us who feel fatigued from it all won't be an easy task.

All of us are impacted by change, and every season of our lives.

And while for the most part we can't control what is happening around us, in us, or to us, we can control our response to it.

And choose to enter into spaces of change with hands that are open to all that God has, even in the mystery.

I'm not sure where change and transition are intersecting your life today, or what circumstances you find yourself in, but wherever you find yourself.

I wanted to take the next few minutes just to bless you, to offer an excerpt in blessing written by one of my favorite philosophers and poets, John O'Donohue.

This reading has served me well over the last year, and it is one that I never tire of hearing or reciting to myself, especially as I navigate great places of change.

My hope is that as you hear the beauty of these words, that they would unlock in you greater peace and vision for all that lies ahead.

And that it would, in some ways, prepare you and even study your heart through the varying winds of change that lie around you today.

John writes this,

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray-parished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye.

Everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season. It has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation.

The cold is relenting. Seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, somewhere, one buds opens, and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible.

From the black heart of winter, a miraculous breathing of plentitude of color emerges. The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed.

The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat, always inching its way forward. Change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival.

Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unaware. And it is there before we see it.

And then we can look nowhere without seeing it. Change arrives in nature when time has ripened. There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinues.

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