Abby King Writes // When You're Between Times

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Your monthly reflection and reading recommendations to nourish your soul.

When You're Between Seasons
 

Every December sky, must lose its faith in leaves
And dream of the spring inside the trees.
-Beth Nielson Chapman
 

It’s the time between seasons in this part of the world. Snowdrops and crocuses are pushing their way up through the soil, blinking hopefully in the daylight. The tiniest blossoms are sporadically appearing on trees, the days are almost imperceptibly lengthening, and the world is tipped on the edge of turning green again.
 
But it’s all still a bit fragile and precarious. The weather is so changeable and there’s a bitter chill that blows through the air on some days, as though winter is not quite ready to let go. I worry that a sudden sharp frost or flurry of snow could kill off our hope that spring is coming. And the winter has already been so long.
 
//
 
There’s an episode of the T.V. show Grey’s Anatomy that opens with a voiceover by the eponymous Meredith Grey. "When you hold on to anything for too long,” she explains, “your muscles conform to the position you're holding. That applies to the heart and the mind, as well as the hand. The pain you know is coming is what makes it easier to just keep holding on.”
 
It makes me think about Jesus’ words to Mary in the resurrection garden.
 
“Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).
 
Do not cling to me.
 
I’ve always been curious about those words. Why would Jesus say them? Mary has been riding the emotional rollercoaster of loving Jesus, losing him and finding him again, and now he’s telling her, don’t cling to me. Clinging would seem like the natural response, like a mother who’s found a lost child, like friends reunited after a long time apart. And wouldn’t you want to hold onto someone who’s come back from the dead, just to make sure they’re real, just to make sure they’re not a figment of your imagination, or a dream you haven’t quite woken up from?
 
But still, that’s what he says.
 
Do not cling to me.
 
Jesus has been resurrected and returned to his friends, but he’s not staying around – at least not in the way Mary has come to know him. Perhaps that’s why she doesn’t recognise him in the garden at first. Perhaps it’s the first chord of a new song Jesus wants to sing with her, perhaps it’s the first step in a new way of dancing together. Let go, he seems to be saying. Don’t cling to your old assumptions about who I am, don’t anxiously grasp onto the way things were before. This transition will require patience and trust. You’ll need to be responsive and flexible as we find new ways of being together.
 
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus puts it this way: ‘Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it’ (Luke 17:33).

Here is the truth: losing your life is excruciating. It’s hard to let go of old certainties and attitudes. It’s hard to get rid of old habits, even though they aren’t serving you anymore. It’s hard when God doesn’t act like you thought he would, like you were always told he would. It’s hard when you want to cling with every fibre of your being to life as you know it, even as you watch it slip through your fingers.
 
Here is another truth: the only thing more agonizing than losing your life is grasping onto it so tightly that your muscles seize up and refuse to move anymore. Anything that doesn’t grow and change atrophies and eventually becomes useless and dead.
 
Do not cling to me.
 
//
 
Sometimes I think it must be a holy miracle that spring appears again every year. How do the trees know when to produce new leaves? How do daffodils know when to emerge? How does the planet know it’s time to tilt closer to the sun?
 
//
 
Resurrection, it seems, is woven into the very DNA of the earth from which we were created. Out of this ground we were taken, this holy ground, this resurrection dust, with its infinite capacity for new life entwining itself around our strands of double helix.
 
We are birthed from dust and like the mythical phoenix, we die and rise from the ashes again and again. Life following death, following life. And in the middle of all the chaos and change, the grief and the disappointment, we still dream of the spring inside the trees. We can’t help it. It’s in our DNA.

Reading Recommendations
The Book of Waking Up, by Seth Haines

I loved Seth's previous book, Coming Clean, so I was really looking forward to his latest work. The Book of Waking up is a beautifully written treatise on life, pain, coping mechanisms and ordering our lives in ways that help us find wholeness in Divine love. It's formatted in short chunks that you can put down and meditate on, which gives it a fresh and original feel. If you feel any kind of pain (that's all of us) and tend to find ways of numbing instead of facing it (again, all of us) then I highly recommend this book to you.

Handle With Care, by Lore Ferguson Wilbert

I haven't ever come across a book about touch, so I was really interested to read this one, and it did not disappoint. Lore deals with what could be a complicated and tender topic with nuance and care. She argues that because physical touch can so often be misconstrued or mishandled, we've thrown the baby out with the bath water, and many of us are starving for touch that is wholesome and healing. Handle With Care reminds us that Jesus touched and was touched and there can be something God-given that minsters to us in touch too. 

And finally...

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With love and gratitude,
Abby