All Shall be Well

Yesterday afternoon we travelled home from visiting friends. It's always sad to leave loved ones, and when it also means we've reached the end of a relaxing break, a whole range of feelings come into play. Together with this, we're at the beginning of a new year, which is often a time for reflection and anticipation. I'm especially aware that for me and us, 2025 holds a lot of newness and uncertainty. In this, there's a sense of apprehension, but also hope.

Image credit: Chris Lund

In 2019, I began writing annual letters to my future self. This New Year's Day, as well as writing another, I looked through all of them. The first referred to feelings of "futility", and emerging from the grief of leaving our previous church family 17 months before. I've recognised for a while now that I'd struggled with various symptoms for quite a few years before they were named. The second letter, I penned when newly diagnosed with depression, and before starting the medication and therapies that would help me to climb out of that black hole. Reading back, I see that whilst my expectations for getting better turned out to be rather unrealistic, this was closely related to having no idea that 2020 would bring a global pandemic. 

Those little letters reflect an ongoing desire that also frequently comes up in my prayer journals. When expressing my hopes as a parent, acknowledging mental ill-health, reflecting on difficult processes, embarking on an MA, working towards ordination, beginning to teach theology, or pondering the possibility of a PhD, I keep returning to the same conviction. Sometimes I write it as a statement: "I'm in God's hands". Sometimes it appears as a prayer: "have your way, Lord".

To trust in God's sovereignty over every circumstance is not to say that my decisions and efforts, or those of others, don't matter. It's not the same as abdicating responsibility, or simply being resigned to predetermined outcomes. It doesn't provide immunity from deep concern, pain, or disappointment. It doesn't mean that I won't sometimes feel compelled to take action. Neither does it suggest that I have the measure of every situation, or that my perception is somehow more right than others'. For those who are interested in the terminology (apologies to everyone else!) a Wesleyan-Arminian understanding of God as omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing) doesn't do away with human will and real God-given agency. Submission to God, then, is about application of that agency, in actively lining up my desires and will with what is revealed of God's good purposes.

Do I always know exactly what God 'wants' in a given situation? No. "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the Lord. 'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'" (Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV) I can be sure, though, that God's overall purposes are good. Jesus' coming amongst us, and his life, death, resurrection, and ascension to God the Father, is the ultimate declaration of that.

So, as we re-engage with life's responsibilities, privileges, challenges and opportunities, I'm going to intentionally keep handing my apprehensions to the One who knows it all and has led us thus far. I'm choosing to trust with the 14th century anchoress Julian of Norwich, that through submitting to God now, in the fullness of time, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"*.⬦

*Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love. Chapter 27.

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