I’m sitting in the A-gates area of the Denver International Airport.  I’ve spent the last nine days in Tennessee seeing family and friends, and it was a really good trip.  I learned some time ago that the only way to get away from work was to leave the island (and even then it can creep in).  I’m grateful for the good work I get to do, but I’m also grateful for a chance for food, sleep, and familial/friendly affection.  So now I’m about thirty minutes away from boarding my flight back to HNL.

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I’m not much for resolutions, mainly because the work of change is constant.  Part of it is the mess of me, of course, but part of it is also the state of things around us.  Those two things live in constant tension, really, and only find resolution in the work of God through Jesus and the sending of the Spirit.  With that comes great freedom and a sense of great responsibility (both its weight and its sense of excitement).  I think it’s okay to exist in a place of “resolved but never solved” because that’s the way life is, both by design and by dysfunction.  Some things, as Steven Curtis Chapman sings, are just unfixable.  Maybe “okay” isn’t the right word, as that sounds like too much acquiescence.  It’s the nature of things.

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I think for me, times like this are an opportunity to check on the scaffolding of life.  That’s both long-standing habits and practices but also the addition of new things here and there.  I’m looking forward to more from Erik Varden, the Bishop of Trondheim (I just like typing that), both for his new book on the crucifixion but also for his year-long look at the lives of the Desert Fathers that starts up today.  I start the new year the same way I ended the old one, with a sense that the monastic movement and the recovery movement have a lot to offer the window of life we call now.  They are key to finding a healthy groove in which to live, I believe.

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The time to head to the gate to board has come.  I’m well aware that landing in HNL will bring with it a list of things to take care of, especially for work.  I’d like to think that I’m returning in a better state than I left in.  It’s a matter of “resolved but never solved,” though, so maybe it’s more about both time and timing.  And that’s a good thing.  Happy New Year!