A New Year - A New Quest

 July 1 is the start of the new sorority year, the new ministerial year (in my denomination) and the new academic year.

My life centers around all of this so much that very often, I am getting a new planner for the new year. 

It opens up for me the way the new calendar year does - filled with blank pages awaiting the adventures to come. There is the promise of hopeful engagement and the doing something new and impactful.

This year is no different, and yet, very different.

For one and for the first time in almost twenty years, my husband is not directly responsible for the life of an academic campus. He is still working within the educational system in a new role, but is no longer on-the-ground at a local campus. That is a new space-of-being.

I am also embarking on a new area of ministry in my denomination as a commissioned deacon with a decided call to life in the arts and community. Being an entrepreneurial and public facing part of the church, I get to decide. So I am the deacon for my state and will spend the year meandering.

Then, I looked up from my blank pages and felt a sense of doom...and...hope.

Doom in that the news hit that the vice president was the deciding vote on the disastrous bill that just passed the senate. My only hope now, like so many in the country, is that it dies in the house. If not, so many people will literally die from the cuts to Medicaid so the super wealthy can have a tax break for one more yacht.

Hope in that we, the people are more than the oligarchy. There is a fight still to be had and as a newly appointed social action chair in my sorority, I get to do that unrestrained by certain politics. Humanity demands our action.

The future can feel uncertain.

There are no guarantees - well, except death. None of us get out of this thing alive. So what are we doing with the time we have? That has always been the question for me. What am I doing with my dash and how is my dash making a difference in this shared existence?

A new year presents possibilities.

For me, it presents a new quest. How can I do all the good I can in all the ways I can in all the places I can for ever as long as I can? That is what is before me on these blank pages.

What is before you?

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