Starting Over…and Over…and Over (Excerpt)
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Each of us, at one time or another, has had the experience of starting over. In such opportunities I see what is meant by theological concepts like redemption and resurrection. We reinvent ourselves in this life; we experience resurrection over and over again as we give ourselves permission to make a new beginning.
But it is also clear that starting over can be very scary, even if liberating. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, my maternal grandparents lost everything. My grandfather owned a shoe store in the small town of Belvedere, Illinois, and the store went bankrupt. My grandmother had never really worked. It was a very scary time. But together they decided to start—of all things—an insurance business. Can you imagine trying to sell insurance in the middle of a depression? People were scuffling just to stay fed, to stay alive. Amazingly, and against all odds, their insurance business began to show a profit.
My grandfather died just as the Depression was coming to an end. But my grandmother, an Illinois farm-girl, went on to build a very successful business. And she continued to sell insurance until she was almost 80. It turned out that she had remarkable people skills. She connected with her customers, continued to follow up with them, entered into their lives. Now, of course I’m not saying that the Depression was a good thing. Far from it! But it provided my grandmother with an opportunity to start over, and to develop skills she didn’t know she had.
My parents, who were just entering adulthood when the Depression hit, were also deeply affected by that experience, but in a different way. For them, that era created economic fears that would last their lifetimes. And I’m sure this is true for many people who lived through the Depression. My parents had terrible fears of financial collapse, despite my grandmother’s success. They had a deep, deep fear of what they called “starting over.” They saw changing careers, or relocating, or anything that would upset the status quo, as a potential disaster.
I was born after the Depression, and I look at starting over very differently. Sure, it’s scary when you’re out of a job, or you’re going through a divorce, or some financial catastrophe has hit, and you don’t know what comes next. When you come right down to it, any sort of change is scary and we tend to resist it. But each and every time I have undergone a process of starting over, of reinventing myself in some way, it has turned out to be an opportunity to grow.
Human beings tend to look for security and want to hang on to things as they are. But when we have an opportunity to reassess who we are and where we’ve been, and maybe redirect our lives, then we also have the chance to come closer to fulfilling our potential. To people who came of age during the Depression, changing careers in one’s later years is unthinkable. Yet for me, entering into UU ministry in my sixties has been a transformative experience, connecting me with a part of myself that was longing to be expressed.
Moving into the future takes a considerable leap of faith. I am always amazed at the strength of the human spirit, at the way that we can suffer reverses, be hurt in so many ways, suffer catastrophes, and yet somehow regroup, pick ourselves up, and carry on into a future we don’t control, as we make a new start, over and over and over.
- Starting Over…and Over…and Over (Excerpt) - September 1, 2016
