What is your next chapter?

What is going to be “the next chapter” of your life?

It hit me last night that I really need to step out of my comfort zone in a big way. I have always known that, but last night, the magnitude of that necessity hit me in the middle of a sound sleep.

I woke up.

The truth of the matter is that we get so comfortable being uncomfortable.  Discomfort has a comfort of its own which we do not like to acknowledge, but it is there, and it paralyzes us.

We lose the right to complain about our circumstances if we refuse to move. If I have a cut and keep pouring salt in it, it seems rather foolish to complain about the pain, right? If I want the pain to stop, I have to stop pouring in the salt.

We so often insist upon pouring salt into our own wounds, our situations, and then we complain. When I woke up last night, I realized my complicity in my angst. I realized that some of what I carry as angst, I carry because I have chosen to keep pouring salt in old wounds.

The death of my sister jostled me. How in the world could one so young go away, be taken by illness? She had the spirit of a fighting hawk; death took her, but not easily. Yet, she is gone, her chances to stop pouring salt into her wounds gone.

It is as if God said to me, “Well, what will YOU do?”

I would bet that God is asking a lot of us that question, not because it is the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one, but because God really wants more of us to “become’ what God created us to be.  It is not about resolutions, which seem flippant, but about conviction about who we are and what we were put here to do.

We have a limited amount of time. When I felt the divine jostle, I knew what God was saying to me.

The chapters of most of our lives fall into a mundane hum. Many to most of us exist as opposed to living. We take everything for granted, from the breaths we take to the days of life we are granted.

Yet, God wants us all to have a “next chapter,” a chapter which will be different from what we have had up until now. God wants us to “be’ what God created us to be, to contribute what God put in us to contribute.

The best thing is that no matter how old we are, as long as we have breath and life, we have a chance to begin the next chapter. Even if we cannot finish the chapter, we need all to begin it. We ought to love ourselves and our potential enough to look into what God sees in us.

Even if one is an atheist, there is a “higher power’ than the “here and now,’ something which can encourage us to reach for the stars even though we may only reach the moon. The important thing is that we reach.

What is your next chapter? All of us have a “next chapter.’

That would be a candid observation.