Every calendar year spans twelve months: it starts fresh in January, runs its course through four seasons (more or less, depending on one’s vantage point on the globe), culminates with the Christmas season, reaches a ripe old age and comes to a close, birthing a new year in its wake. This is a cycle that we experience regularly, every 365 days: it is relatively predictable, reliable, and we like that, because it doesn’t require a whole lot of conscious thought. We’ve done it before and, good health and Lord willing, we’ll do it again.

So many other aspects of life happen in cycles, too: from the microcosmic 24-hour day: waking – productivity – rest & recovery, to the mesocosmic human lifespan: birth – creativity – death, not to mention the macrocosmic generations, civilisations and eras experiencing their own stages of birth, fruitful processes and death.

Having familiar daily and annual cycles lends rhythm & routine to our lives, which we find comforting and manageable. This gives us space – ‘mental bandwidth’ – to deal with the less-predictable events that inevitably arise along the way. People are all different, and everyone deals with change in his or her own way, but it’s safe to say that change often incites some measure of instability, to a lesser or greater degree. When the change is positive it can initiate surges of dopamine and oxytocin, while negative changes entail more fight-or-flight adrenaline and cortisol. An important variable, though, is predictability: positive events that we plan or foresee give us time to build up eager anticipation, while negative changes are more palatable, less stressful, when we see them coming. We’re control-oriented creatures: although infants generally go nicely with the flow, they quickly develop into slightly older toddlers who tend to fare better when they understand what’s going on and can wrap their brains around what to expect. “In five minutes it will be time to start getting ready for bed” goes down a whole lot better than a sudden “Ok, time’s up! Put the toys away now, it’s time for bed.” It seems that the more we mature, the more control we want to exert over our lives.

….To a point: once we reach our peak, true maturity – at whatever age that may be for each of us – we start to appreciate the Lord’s role in our world and to trust in His providence; we relinquish our tight grasp on the trajectories of our own lives and begin humbling ourselves before Him, following His rules and welcoming His will to be done.

Growing up, I looked forward to events saying that I was ‘anxious’ for them to happen: “I’m anxious to see you again!” “I’m anxious to go on vacation!” That’s how everyone around me expressed it. Maybe this wording reflects the origins of change inducing a stress response? I’m not sure that this phraseology really relays the sentiment of what we’re actually feeling, though: we don’t want to feel the stress of anxiety, but rather the excitement of eagerness! “I’m eager to spend time with you!”

Yes, we naturally want to be able to control our lives – it is indeed a natural thing for us humans to want to do – but that’s precisely the problem: wanting to control events, essentially wanting to know the future, is a natural thing, not a spiritual thing; it is a selfish tendency. To an extent we do sort of need to control things in order to keep our sanity intact, but ultimately the Lord wants us to relax and to trust.

A desire to know the future is innate in many people, but since this desire originates in a love for what is evil, it is taken away from people who believe in divine providence, and they are given a trust that the Lord will take care of their fate. So they do not want to know it in advance, fearing that they might in some way interfere with the Divine Providence. (Divine Providence 179)

The Lord’s Divine Providence is present within the smallest details of a person’s life; for there is only one source of life, namely the Lord, from whom we derive our being, life, and action. (Arcana Coelestia 10774)

The Lord promises that we’ll be happier if we just ‘let go and let God’. As creatures wanting to manage our own lives, letting go can be really difficult…however the Lord doesn’t lie, He isn’t preying on our gullibility or leading us astray. When we reach the point where we’re ready to give up and humble ourselves before Him, trusting in His Word and desiring that His will be done, we can be happy. This only happens little by little, there isn’t one grand moment of surrender, so we can take courage in every little step we take towards Him: every time we greet a change with acceptance, every time we enter a new phase of life with curiosity for what it will bring, letting go of the anxiety of trying to predict outcomes, we are moving that much closer to Him and His ideal for us – and this makes Him happy, and we will be happy and find peace.

Peace holds within itself trust in the Lord, the trust that He governs all things and provides all things, and that He leads towards an end that is good. When a person believes these things about Him he [or she] is at peace, since [s]he fears nothing and no anxiety about things to come disturbs him [or her]. (Arcana Coelestia 8455)

I couldn’t not include this oft-quoted Arcana passage about peace as it feels like the perfect note on which to end, on this occasion of our beloved New Christian Woman blog taking a hiatus for the foreseeable future. There are no coincidences: this community has served a tremendous purpose and been a great support for women around the world throughout the duration of its run. Thank you so much, Eden & Abby, for overseeing this mighty project! We appreciate your dedication through the years.♥