{"id":669,"date":"2012-01-02T10:52:49","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T18:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/amusingamma\/?p=669"},"modified":"2012-01-02T10:52:49","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T18:52:49","slug":"looking-back-looking-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/amusingamma\/2012\/01\/looking-back-looking-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back, Looking Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A New Year is a ripe occasion for spiritual practice, a chance to look back at what the past year has offered, and a chance to dream and to hope about what could\"\"<\/a> be in the year ahead.<\/p>\n

The look backward is sometimes called the Examen, a prayer practice that asks these questions: \u201cwhere is the last year did I experience the most freedom?\u201d and \u201cwhere in the last year was I most constricted?\u201d \u00a0Those focused lenses help me name, and then savor the way I am experiencing the Holy working in my life. My calendars for the last year help me\u2026\u201doh really, that is what happened, I have already forgotten!\u201d My journals remind me and reflect where I was this time last year in looking back. They are never written to be preserved for history, as if someone would like to publish them some day, but are current markers of what the day and moment has evoked, and where I am seeing or not seeing the Presence in them. In retrospect I can take great joy and offer up bushels of thanksgiving for the times and places where I recognize that God has been faithful, that I have moved beyond a stuck place, where the Spirit has made a way when there was no way. I am also confronted with the ways in which there remain \u00a0recurring themes that require work and attention, things done and undone for which I need forgiveness and resolve to keep participating in my own healing.<\/p>\n

This year I have had some profound experiences of healing from past wounds, of \u00a0God\u2019s providence in putting me the right place at the right time, of the creative breezes of the Spirit sparking my imagination. For these I am profoundly grateful! When I stop to count up the gifts of the year, the list overflows onto many pages. The losses and griefs are many, too. Maybe that is part of the fabric of life with the process of passing years. Even though I don\u2019t have many skills as a prophet, I do notice with deep affect the changes in the world as I came to know it when growing up. The Church is changing, and I wonder if there are places in it for people of my age and stage. The neighborhood is changing; small business owners whom we have frequented since moving here have had to close up shop in these days of economic doldrums. The level of civility and of assumptions of respect have vanished with the speed of the old, now obsolete, Etch-a-Sketch. The presence of the needs of the world are inescapable, and I wonder from whence the wisdom and discernment to act as a person of Spirit will come.<\/p>\n

So I turn my face to the year ahead. Since my absence of prophetic gifts has already been duly noted, I am thrown back on lifting up what it is I can count on, on what is unshakable, concrete reality for me:<\/p>\n