What causes you to marvel? I marvel when I think back on my life’s path and see so clearly God’s merciful intentions. Isn’t hindsight perceptive? Had I known back then what I know today, I would have relaxed more in his care.
—PATSY CLAIRMONT
The Women of Faith Daily Devotional
Every morning my husband, David, gets up at six o’clock with or without an alarm. Sixteen precise hours later, he goes to bed at 10 P.M. His pattern of transitioning in and out of his day is as predictable as a Fourth of July parade. Each morning, he anticipates a new beginning, and he moves smoothly from one event to another. He’s an easy guy to live with, and I love how he even brings me a cup of tea on occasion. I know I can depend on him.
However, after years of marriage to such a dependable person, I am still about twenty minutes behind him. Oh, I’m always on time for events, but I don’t keep the same orderly pace that he does. You see, I don’t like to end things. I don’t like to end the day and go to bed, I don’t like to end my sleep and get up, and I don’t even like to stop what I’m doing and leave the house.
That should have been my first clue as to how we would handle the transition of a major move across the country.
Can you guess who adjusted five minutes after getting off the airplane and who took five years to adjust? You’re right—David was off and running as soon as we left the luggage carousel. As for me, I stewed about what happened to my life. That’s when I began to look for a pattern about the unpredictable times women face—those planned and unplanned phases called transitions.
Just When You Think You Have Life under Control
Once you develop an organized and simplified lifestyle, you may feel that all is well and under control, but that may not be true. You are just in a good place at the moment. When things start to happen and you’ve been caught by surprise, however—a teenager in trouble, a sudden change in health, or losing a loved one—it’s easy to feel like things are spinning out of control. That’s when you enter a time of unexpected transition.
Other times we have transitions that we anticipate, like getting married, having a baby, moving to a new house, or retiring after a lifetime of hard work. But knowing it is coming doesn’t make it any easier.
A transition can happen by choice or by chance. It doesn’t really matter how it happens—it matters how you handle it. How you handle a transition determines the mark it leaves on your life. It can either blend into the passages of time or leave a scar reminding you of the pain.
In this chapter, we’ll look at four situations: moving, health changes, losing a loved one, and weddings. We’ll look at ways we can handle these transitions with more finesse and less stress.
Transition Patterns
After several painful transitional times of my own, I learned that transitions don’t always have a clean start and a tidy ending. Webster’s dictionary defines transition as “the passing from one activity, place, or condition to another.”
William Bridges, author of the book Transitions, writes that transitions have three natural phases:
1. An ending. This signals that something is over, and we need to let go of the people and places who once defined who we were.
2. The neutral zone. This temporary time between an ending and a new beginning is an important phase to reorient your life and direction.
3. The new beginning. This is the time when you are physically and emotionally ready to move into a new phase.
The first and last phases are pretty obvious, but sometimes we encounter a rocky neutral zone in the middle without knowing why. That’s what happened to me, as you’ll soon see.
Simplify the Transition: Moving
Our recent phase of family transitions began with a cross-country move from Rochester, New York, to San Diego, California, for my husband’s work. I was leaving behind thirteen years of raising our children from preschool through high school, a home church with fulfilling ministries, and my flourishing speaking and consulting career.
David’s new job started so rapidly that we didn’t even have time to find a home to move into. The company settled us into a Marriott Residence Inn for what turned out to be eight long, interminable weeks. I woke up each morning to the same questions: Where am I? How did I get here? What am I to do today?
That’s when I called Kathy, a wise counselor and my friend from back home. “Kathy, ”I asked, “what in the world do I do when I have no responsibilities and very little to do? You know I am a doer and someone who needs a place to call home.”
“There’s one thing you can be doing when you are in transition. When you can’t control the external, focus on the internal,” Kathy said.
A life lesson for when you are in transition: When you can’t control the external, focus on the internal.
—KATHLEEN ELLIOTT, executive director of Agape Counseling Associates
Her advice helped me relax. I started doing some reading and looking at the temporary housing time as a vacation. After all, when you move three thousand miles to a new city where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you, there aren’t a lot of distractions. I focused on spending time with the five of us and discovering our new hometown. Eventually we moved into a new home, and life began settling into a routine.
Our move actually bonded us as a family. After all, we only had ourselves those first few months until we made friends and settled in. Our children were amazed by the Southern California lifestyle, where they could take surfing as a P.E. class or walk outside to change classrooms. High schoolers just didn’t do that in New York, but you could in California. We looked at everything as a West Coast adventure, but at the same time, I have to confess that I stayed in the neutral zone of the transition for a long time, and I didn’t know why.
Three-Part Transition: Moving
| PERSON IN TRANSITION |
1. AN ENDING | 2. THE NEUTRAL ZONE | 3. THE NEW BEGINNING |
| •Mom (that would be me) | •Move from New York to California | •Temporary housing • Parenting teens through the transition • Looking for new roles |
•Making friends,
finding a church • Joining several new groups |
STEPS TO SIMPLIFY YOUR MOVING
1. Take pictures to preserve good memories. Take lots of pictures of your old home and friends.
2. Start a moving notebook. Keep lists in it such as
• Hopes and Dreams for My New Home
• Things to Remember to Do
• Things to Sell or Give Away
3. Downscale room by room. Start by emptying rooms that won’t be in your new home (for example, an extra bedroom and closet or a basement).
4. Give yourself permission to leave bad memories behind. Whether it’s an old sofa or a garage full of clutter, leave it behind. The bigger, the better!
5. Take your favorite things that bring you pleasure. Choose one box of things that make you smile and unpack it early.
6. Use one room for “get rid of” stuff and empty it often. Plan garage sales and organize pick-ups from charities early on.
7. Maintain order in your regular living areas. Don’t create piles for the move in the family room and kitchen.
8. Accept the offers of friends. Accept offers to bring meals and help you pack. Cherish the extra time together.
9. Don’t pay to move anything you don’t love! When you unpack, you will be surrounded by “good” stuff you like.
10. Use garage sale income for your new home. Buy new towels or something pretty to help the transition.
Simplify the Transition: Health
A year after we moved to San Diego, we said good-bye to our oldest child, Christy, as she traveled cross-country to college in Chicago—another transition for David and me.
Around Valentine’s Day, our second daughter, Lisa, was feeling run down and tired in high school. David and I had longstanding plans to go away on a weekend cruise, so we took her in for a checkup. After examining her, the doctor reassured us. “Just keep her home and resting,” he said. We reluctantly left her in the care of a neighbor for the weekend.
When we arrived home, we learned that Lisa had been hospitalized the night before for severe flulike symptoms. The doctors performed a spinal tap, at which point her health collapsed. Lisa never returned to school to complete her junior year. We were stunned.
This transition was definitely unexpected. Lisa and I spent days, weeks, and months going to specialists to ease her pain. Each week we hoped that by “next Monday” she would be back in high school. That never happened.
I still remember the nights my husband carried Lisa up the stairs to bed because of numbness and pain. His steadiness and her courage gave me strength. And old friends and new friends prayed for her healing.
Other good folks helped us through the long neutral zone of this health transition, like the little five-year-old girl who asked her daddy, one of Lisa’s teachers, if he would deliver a gift of pink nail polish to my daughter. When he asked her why, the kindergartner innocently replied, “Because when she looks down at her pretty nails, then she can feel happy.”
Lisa’s illness turned out to be full-blown mononucleosis with severe migraines. The disease ravaged her for three months straight. The migraines finally subsided, but the mono took longer. Just when we thought things were getting better, the rheumatologist exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness, Lisa has fibromyalgia!” Our hearts sank as we realized Lisa now had a lifelong painful condition. She was at risk for even finishing high school.
Six months into the ordeal, we received a phone call from a doctor in South Dakota who was able to help Lisa. His treatment plan started to relieve the pain and fatigue. She began to improve slowly but steadily. We saw glimmers of hope.
In September of her senior year, Lisa made it to school more days than she missed. In time she gave up her handicapped-parking sticker, and with great determination she graduated with honors with her high-school class!
She made it through her health transition over the next four years and recently graduated from college. Lisa is back to life—a different life—but still as a beautiful, talented girl with a wiser and more tender heart. We thank God for giving her a second chance at life.
When you think things cannot get any worse, God carries you farther into the valley and comes out holding your hand.
—LISA RAMSLAND, her high-school yearbook quote
Three-Part Transition: Health
| PERSON IN
TRANSITION |
1. AN ENDING | 2. THE NEUTRAL ZONE | 3. THE NEW BEGINNING |
| •Lisa | •Healthy highschool girl becomes ill | •Long illness and diagnosis during high school | •Day by day |
| •Mom (me) | •Suddenly the mother of a very sick teenager | •One year recovering, three years to stabilize | •Seeing Lisa go to college and function on her own |
HEALTH TO ILLNESS TRANSITION TIPS
For the patient:
1. Focus on little improvements you see and not on where you used to be.
2. Fill your mind with truth and the most positive outlook you can muster.
3. Accept the help of people around you, and be grateful for each day you make it through the pain and medical tests.
4. Celebrate anything you can.
5. Accept that people will not know what to say or how to help you, but appreciate their good intentions.
6. Gravitate to those who are a source of strength.
To the caregiver:
1. Be the advocate for your patient to move him or her forward to better health.
2. Keep yourself strong and healthy so you will be able to pour your energies into his or her recovery.
3. Remember you are a source of strength, so deal with your emotions with other friends, not your patient.
4. Give him or her hope. When your patient has none, he or she will cling to yours.
Simplify the Transition: Loss
I had companionship throughout Lisa’s health crisis—my mother-in-law, Nana, who was taking care of my father-in-law after he started displaying symptoms of Alzheimer’s. As serious as both situations were, we could still support one another and laugh about how our “patients” did for the day.
Like the times Poppy put his clothes on backward, or stole ice cream in the night and put the soggy box back into the refrigerator instead of the freezer. When he developed liver cancer, however, we knew the end was coming. We prepared ourselves for another transition.
On the same day Poppy peacefully died in his sleep under hospice care, a jarring piece of news came our way. My dear Aunt Lor, who had supported me with love and regular phone calls over the years, fell and apparently had a stroke. At eighty-five years young, she had never been sick in her life. My source of strength here on earth was crushed.
That was the darkest day of my life: my daughter was barely functioning, my father-in-law had died, and my dear aunt had a stroke. I cried out to God that day, “How much more can one person take?” as I dissolved into tears.
Everything works out right in the end.
If things are not working right, it isn’t the end yet.
Don’t let it bother you, relax and keep on going.
—MICHAEL C. MUHAMMAD
Strength for the Day
The good thing is that when you hit bottom, God gives you strength for the day and the only way out is moving forward. For us at that time that meant attending Poppy’s funeral in Chicago. Three weeks later, we flew across the continent to Florida, this time to visit Aunt Lor at her lowest point. The trip was difficult because Lisa had to be wheeled through several airports, but Lisa really wanted to see her great-aunt who had been her support in crisis.
I thought back to a conversation a couple months earlier when my daughter called Aunt Lor. “So what have you been doing lately?” Lisa asked.
“I haven’t done anything, Lisa, because I’ve been praying for you all day,” she replied.
My daughter was blown away. People like Aunt Lor are the ones you want to know when you go through painful transitions. They carry you in their hearts.
Sadly Aunt Lor passed away six weeks after Poppy. Life wasn’t getting any easier, but we were getting stronger as we moved through each transition. There must be better times ahead, we reasoned.
Fear comes from feeling out of control. Hope comes from knowing who is in control. And hope comes from knowing that we have a sovereign, loving God who is in control of every event of our lives.
—LISA BEAMER, Women of Faith magazine
Are You Okay?
One transition prepares us for the next. About a year later my own father was in hospice care and I was more aware of what would be happening and how I would handle it. In time, he passed away peacefully, and I was proud of his years of perseverance through the pain of arthritis.
For the next few hours after the news, I felt a sense of heightened alertness. Now that the news was final, I kept checking in with myself, and I really thought I was okay. I needed to run an errand. But as I drove along, I glanced up and realized I had just run a red light and driven straight through an intersection. Wow, I’m not okay, I thought. I need to get home.
Even though you know it’s coming, the news still hits you hard. Losing a parent is like losing a piece of your security. Never minimize the impact it will have on you.
A Second Life Lesson
During times of loss, don’t trust yourself to be functioning normally for some time. Rely on the help of those around you until you get your bearings again.
Three-Part Transition: Loss
| PERSON IN TRANSITION |
1. AN ENDING | 2. THE NEUTRAL ZONE | 3. THE NEW BEGINNING |
| • Mom (me) | •Deaths of fatherinlaw, dear Aunt Lor, then my father | •Dealing with losing
relatives • Lisa improving |
•Accepting losses • Receiving support of relatives |
Simplify the Transition: Better Times Ahead
It’s important to peacefully close painful chapters in our lives because better ones are often waiting ahead. In our family, life’s pain subsided as we experienced the wedding of our oldest daughter. It was the cycle of life: There is loss in death, but there is renewal in weddings and new babies that will surely come into the world.
When our oldest daughter, Christy, became engaged seven months after my father’s funeral, we were ready for a season of happiness. What a good experience for the family to gather together on such a joyous occasion. A nephew’s wedding three months later reconfirmed that there is happiness in life after hard times. Look for them. You can expect them.
Advice to Brides (and Families) about Weddings
1. Enjoy the time from engagement to the wedding. It is a fun time because everyone loves a love story.
2. Spend equal time planning your marriage as you do planning your wedding day. It sets the stage for a good life together.
3. Enjoy the decisions of where to live, what you’ll do as a new bride, and how to set up a home as a chance to get to know your spouse and make decisions together.
4. Shift your loyalties from your family to your spouse. Put him first.
5. Organize and pare down your stuff before you move into your new home.
6. Start to combine your calendars and schedules during your engagement. Think in terms of “we” on your calendar, not just “me.”
Three-Part Transition: Wedding
| PERSON IN
TRANSITION |
1. AN ENDING | 2. THE NEUTRAL ZONE | 3. THE NEW BEGINNING |
| • Mother (me) | •Daughter getting married | •Engagement and wedding planning | •Seeing newlyweds’ apartment and knowing they are happy |
Change Points Create a New You
Having gone through all the transitional times and coming out the other end, I can attest to the need to make sense of losses and transitions.
Often you can get flashes of insight that give everything a new perspective. For me, it was a story described by Dr. Charles Stanley in his book The Blessings of Brokenness that put my life into perspective.
It seems that one day a woman approached Dr. Stanley, a famed pastor from Atlanta, and told him that it felt like years since God had used her. “Does God still have something for me?” she asked.
The pastor questioned her, asking when was the last time she ever felt like God was trying to change something in her life. She couldn’t think of a time. So Dr. Stanley asked, “Have you ever had any great problems in your life—difficulties that seemed to pull the rug out from under your feet emotionally, spiritually, perhaps even physically?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but I just waited them out.”
“Did those problems change anything in you?”
“No,” she said with great resolution. “I’m a survivor. I didn’t change a bit. I stuck to my guns.”
“That’s likely the problem,” said Dr. Stanley. “As long as you refuse to recognize the ways in which the Lord desires for you to grow and change, the Lord can’t trust you to do His bidding. . . . He has a great and wonderful purpose and plan for your life, but He can’t bring you into the fullness of it as long as you refuse to grow and change in your spirit.”
After reading that story, the pieces of my life fell into place: My purpose was to grow and to change through each transition. No longer was my goal in trials to simply survive—it was to grow into more maturity, to be transformed into tenderness of heart, and to develop strength of character.
The hard times in my life all started to make sense. I was going to be fine. And so are you!
However you have learned to deal with them, endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness before life resumes an intelligible pattern and direction, while the third phase is that of beginning anew.
—WILLIAM BRIDGES, Transitions
Personal Reflection
To help you through a particularly hard time that you can’t make sense out of, try jour-naling the answers to these questions. It will help you “emotionally relocate” and let your emotions catch up to what is happening around you. You really can make it through every transition you face. God will not give you more than you can handle with His help.
Steps to Make Sense of Your Transition
1. Name the transition: ________________
2. What was I like before this transition?
3. How have I grown because of this experience?
3. What did I do well (or am doing well) through this transition?
4. Are there people I need to thank for helping me through this transition?
5. What got me through the transition?
____________________________________________________________________
6. Is there anything I have to resolve before I can move forward?
7. Is there any way this transition can be used in a positive direction?
A Simple Prayer of Faith
Dear God, sometimes transitions are hard for me. Would You put Your tender loving arms around me and hold me when I’m afraid, and fill me with courage and vision when I need to take action? I thank You for family and friends. I pray for strength for the day, and I cling to the promise that You will always be with me. Amen.
[She] will have no fear of bad news;
[her] heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD.
[Her] heart is secure, [she] will have no fear;
in the end [she] will look in triumph on [her] foes.
—PSALM 112:7–8