New Years Greeting to My Readers

To you, my subscribers and readers of this blog, whom I consider my fellow travelers and friends–

 Greetings for this new year!

I wanted to take some space on this blog to thank you so much for tagging along with me on this eighteen month journey of “Falling Forward.”

I began this blog with a simple wish to open my inner life to my children–to share with them my story–a story of the repeating cycle of falling down, of the grace of surrender, and the resulting redemption and reconciliation into a life of increasing freedom, love, and joy.

I soon discovered that I was not only writing to and for my children, but I was writing to my family, my friends, and finally to a larger community who have in some way identified with my cycle of falling forward, over and over again. I thought well and hard about sharing the intimate details of my life, but my heart won out over my head.

I have come to realize I write these little reflections because I need to connect with others. I need to know I am not alone when perplexed over and over by the random events of life–events I am without the resources to cope, until I raise my arms and ask for help.

As my literary friend Frederick Buechner has written;

“But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.”

I have been motivated to continue this blog by the response of many of you, who say to me ‘Yes, I know that feeling, that experience’. I have thought several times of ending the blog, but just as I send another out, I receive that one comment back, and I am encouraged to go on.

I am not writing for the world. The world doesn’t really give a flip about how I live and what I am learning in the process. I first of all write for myself–to try to understand just a little more how to live a life of compassion and love in a hard world.

I also am writing directly to you. When I sit down to write, I see you –as if you are sitting across from me at a small table at the local coffee-house and we are having an old-fashioned heart-to-heart.

I am definitely not writing to instruct, but simply to share portions of my journey with you, and hopefully find a place to connect with you–to join with you on your journey in the very common experience of being a human being on this planet.

Without you, I am simply journaling–a valuable exercise in its own –but misses that element of connection.

A quote I have used on several occasions on this blog site is from Ram Doss, “We are all just walking each other home”. I wish to continue walking home with you.

This past year has been a stressful year for our nation on various levels. It is no secret that we live in a climate of division, of antagonism, of choosing sides, of seeing each other separate from us, as the opponent.

In my experience, how stressed I get in my life is always an indicator of how much I am placing my ultimate trust in myself, or in others, rather than in a loving God who is personal to me.

I believe that when we choose to go deep enough in our contacts with others, below the surface where the troubled waters can only be found, we find we are made of the same substance, swimming in the same stream. Each of us desires the same few but critical things–freedom, dignity, happiness, and meaning.

We may differ in our unique life experiences, and how we see and interpret these experiences. That is where we can make our connection–by accepting that we may see differently on the surface, but underneath we are the same.

So, may I always stay open to you and value your own life experience, and how you have come to this day–and may you stay open to me and how I got here.It is a beautiful thing when we realize that in our core, we really are brothers and sisters, and all children of God, walking each other home.

So, I thank you my subscribers, my readers, my friends, for joining me these past eighteen months. I will continue to write these little reflections directly to you, and I eagerly hope to hear back from you.

Please know you are in my prayers for a year full of God’s blessings–for more of His peace, freedom, dignity, happiness, meaning, and love.

Happy New Year

Bob