Starting Over

The year 1996 brought a series of new beginnings for my family and me. I graduated from Emory University's Candler School of Theology with an MDiv and was appointed to serve as Associate Pastor in a 15-year-old congregation in southeast Huntsville, AL. My son would be entering his senior year at Grissom High School, my husband would be looking for a job again because he had chosen to follow an unconventional path in support of my call to full-time minstry, and I would be starting my journey as a United Methodist pastor. Does that sound like enough newness to make a 45-year-old woman's knees tremble? It does if she has any sense at all!

I knew how to walk into a high school classroom and set the course for the year ahead. I had done it for 20 years. In short, I knew how to be a high school English and Latin teacher! And as a classroom teacher, I was forbidden to pray out loud. Now I was expected to pray out loud!

Just when I should have been preparing for retirement, I was starting all over again! As I remember these new beginnings in my life, I am reminded of a line from one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I chose the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference!

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3: 22-23

Copyright 2009 Lynn W. Dimon