Begin Again by Leeana Tankersley

Author:Leeana Tankersley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living / Women;REL012130;REL012000;REL012120
ISBN: 9781493412518
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

eleven

A Threshold

The horizon leans forward,

Offering you space to place new steps

of change.

Maya Angelou

When I was a sophomore in college, I finally made a decision about a boy I had been seeing back home. We had been very close in high school and our relationship was carrying over to college, but now we were long-distance and we were, looking back, trying to find a way to say goodbye to each other. The goodbye was the long, slow ripping of a Band-Aid.

And once it was finished, really finished, I did the thing most women do in this situation: I cut off my hair.

I went to the salon and told the girl to cut it. I saw ten inches of my thick blonde waves falling to the floor and I felt some sort of truth entering into my bones. Somehow, ridding myself of that hair was different than, say, changing the color. There was something incredibly important about letting go as a symbol of what had just occurred in my life relationally.

I walked out of the salon feeling emboldened, because I had finally let go of something I had been clinging to. And I’m not talking about my hair, here.

The first time I washed it after the cut, I couldn’t believe how good it felt to have so little hair and to feel the water straight onto my neck in the shower. What took years, literally years, to become clear . . . all of a sudden was clear. And I chopped my hair as a symbol of finally knowing.

We do all sorts of things to commemorate awakenings in our lives—get tattoos, cut our hair, paint the house, purge all our clutter. Awakenings are sacred. Crossing thresholds in our lives is sacred. New territory. Knowing we will not go back.

As we are participating in the work of letting the dead trees go, of our own integration, the door has now opened to us. But here we are, distinctly facing the threshold. The threshold, if crossed, represents a point of no return, a point of knowing that cannot be erased.

You will sense a threshold, a point at which you can either pass through or turn around. Regardless of what you choose, it’s OK. You are still loved. You are still worthy. You are still held by God.

But if you do decide to cross the threshold, you will become more awake. This is good and scary, and you likely will not be able to go back, you will not let yourself go back. Because once you wake up and see that you were, in fact, slightly dozed off, you will want to protect your awareness.

This kind of beginning again requires us to pay attention.

You will look back and wonder how you got to this point. The path will be a veritable scribble-scrabble. But here you are, nonetheless. You will see so much winding that the path itself won’t look like any path at all. But then, just maybe, you will make out a winding that

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