I need to switch hair gel.

The humidity has crashed in uninvited and every year at this time my hair freaks out. What I use throughout the dry winter months is no longer suitable for the hot and humid days. One day, we go about our business with the heat on in the car as we drive to work and the air on when we come home. And then blammo. The switch flips and it's hot. And humid. All day and all night.

Some people have knees that alert them to incoming weather, I have hair that tells me summer's here.

As the conditions change, so must my habits. I love the hair product I use in the winter. But, staying with what used to work won't serve me any longer.

I see this reluctance to change in spiritual journeys. We reach for what worked before, out of habit or comfort or because we don't yet realize the conditions have shifted.
A way of praying that carried us through one season of life goes dry.
A way of being in community that once felt life-giving starts to chafe, or a reluctance to join has become a need for something larger than ourselves.
A habit, a practice, a way of understanding God that fit perfectly in the winter of one chapter, but now it's humid, and nothing is sitting right, and we can't quite figure out why.

It's not that those things were wrong. It's that seasons change.

This is especially true, I think, of the images of God we carry. Most of us were handed our first pictures of the divine by people who loved us: parents, teachers, pastors, communities of faith who gave us what they had. Those images carried us. They were real and they were given with love. But faith, if it's alive, keeps growing. And sometimes growth means gently, gratefully releasing an understanding of God that no longer fits who we are or what we've experienced or what we've come to know.

That can feel disorienting. It can even feel like a kind of disloyalty to the people who taught us and the tradition that formed us, as though moving on from an old belief is a rejection of everyone who held it before us. But it isn't. Releasing an image of God that has grown too small is not a betrayal of the people who gave it to you. It may be the fullest expression of what they actually hoped for you: that your faith would grow.

Forgiveness works something like this too. We sometimes resist releasing a wound because it feels like letting someone off the hook, as if our holding on is keeping some kind of ledger balanced. But forgiveness, as a spiritual practice, isn't really about the other person at all. It's about freeing ourselves from the weight of carrying something that was never meant to be permanent. The one we're forgiving may never know. The release is for us.

The same grace applies to our evolving faith. We can release old beliefs, even beloved ones, without anger, without shame, and without needing to indict the people or traditions that first offered them to us. We can say: that was true for that season. And now I'm in a new one.

God, I believe, is not threatened by our growth. The divine presence that has been with us through every season of our lives is not waiting for us to get our theology exactly right before drawing close. That presence meets us here, in the middle of the changing, luring us gently forward into what we might yet become.

Summer is here. Something in you may already know it's time to let something go. That's not loss. That's how we keep growing.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is to release what no longer works in your life with gratitude for the seasons it served you well, and embrace what's next. Though it might be a little frightening or intimidating, it's growth, and movement toward an even deeper and meaningful relationship with the One who calls and sustains you. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa