Overview

Throughout our lives, we are presented with opportunities to follow new paths, to find purpose and new ways to engage, to pursue new interests and relationships that may not have fit before.  We are constantly rewriting our lives.  When we do this with intention, trust, and creative visioning, we can find ourselves transformed by moments of incredible potential.

Viewing transitions as opportunities, we can take time to be reflective in our meaning-making.  We can ask ourselves:  What will my life’s story be about moving forward?  What is my legacy?  What lives on after me and what can I transfer to others?  How can I understand and nurture the new aspects of my spirituality that will support my future growth?  How can I nurture and cultivate relationships that nourish and sustain me, where we can be intimate and vulnerable enough to ask for and offer to help one another?


article: What is Renewal?, in which author Craig Barnett proposes that the key to renewing our personal lives can be found through Quaker spiritual practices.  While focusing on renewal for Quaker meetings, the transformative power of Quaker worship and discernment can shape our lives as individuals seeking meaning, too. 

This is the promise that the source of our purpose, healing and transformation is within, and it can be encountered and followed through collective Quaker practices of worship, discernment and testimony…. The renewal of our own lives and our Quaker communities depends on rediscovering a shared sense of the purpose of Quaker practices; to enable us to continually deepen and renew our experience of the inward life of the Spirit. A deeper and more transformative experience of Quaker worship will lead to more vibrant communities that are attractive to more diverse kinds of people. A renewed practice of discernment will make our leadings clearer and more compelling, enabling us to take risks with confidence in the empowerment and accompaniment of the Inward Guide. This will result in a renewed commitment to Quaker testimony, and a more powerful impact and visibility in the wider world.

Published on Transition Quaker, January 2019. 


Consider these words from Horace B. Pointing, quoted in Quaker Faith & Practice of Britain Yearly Meeting.  If you have a bit more time, use the practices of Friendly Bible Study or Lectio Divina to dive deeper.

The art of living must be studied, as must every art. It calls for imagination, so that every advance, every change, is not merely a difference, but a creative act. Achievement, at any level above the lowest, calls for courage to hold on, in spite of current moods, and for exacting self-discipline. The art of Christian living calls for the same self-preparation; but its reward is not merely aesthetic satisfactions. The soul, hungry for God, is fed. Life itself takes on new meaning. Thus it is that we break from the confines of the prisons we have built about ourselves. Thus it is we are brought into the freedom of the Kingdom of God which, every day, through the wide world, is being realised in the hearts of men.


Or watch this QuakerSpeak video: Creating a Friends Victory Garden (6 minutes)

“I just couldn’t sit in my house and feel scared and powerless,” Avis Wanda McClinton says, thinking back to the early months of the pandemic. “There’s always something to do, you know? I’m a child of God. He gave me these beautiful hands and gave me this big heart, and I know how to grow food.” So that’s what she did.

Original video by QuakerSpeak, a project of Friends Journal.  Filmed and edited by Rebecca Hamilton-Levi.  Transcript here.

Or listen to this episode of The Growing Edge Podcast, The Curious Promise of Limited Time (50 minutes). Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer share a conversation about living with an awareness of our own horizon line, when we become more aware of “the curious promise of limited time.”


Queries for Reflection and Connection
  • In the Creating a Friends Victory Garden video, Avis Wanda McClinton describes how she found meaning and purpose in response to the pandemic by paying attention to God.  What is God inviting you to do with your beautiful hands and your big heart?
  • In the Growing Edge podcast, Carrie Newcomer and Parker Palmer talk about the “curious promise of limited time.”  They offer this query, As we become aware of our horizon line, how do we want to live in the time given? What do we want to let go of, and what do we want to give ourselves to?
  • A meaningful life offers both purpose and connection.  How have previous life transitions offered you opportunities to foster connection with others?  What did you learn that you can take forward into the life you’re living into?
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