I walk with people through the part of a change where the old thing is over and the new one has not arrived.
There is a stretch of country that opens up when something you had counted on comes to an end. It is not grief exactly and it is not a fresh start either. It is the part in between, and most of us walk it alone because it is hard to describe to anyone who has not been there.
I have been there. That is most of what I have to offer.
I pastored a church, and then I did not, and the leaving was not tidy. A marriage ended. The house went with it. There is a finished book on a hard drive that no publisher wanted and probably no one ever will.
Each of those was a door closing on a version of my life I had planned around. Each one put me in the same country: after, but not yet anywhere. I learned the landmarks there the slow way — the particular exhaustion of it, the way time stops behaving, how much of the work is simply staying put and paying attention while something rearranges itself underneath you.
I am not telling you this to trade stories, and I am not going to hand you mine at length. I mention it because it is the reason I can be useful. When you start describing the disorientation, you will not have to explain it to me first.
I am not writing from the far bank. There are thresholds I am in the middle of right now, and there are things about my own life I do not have an answer for yet. If you were looking for someone who has arrived, that is not what this is.
What I can do is walk with you. Ask the question that has not been asked yet. Notice what you keep circling back to. Say plainly when something sounds like it is ending, and stay in the conversation while you decide what to do about it. Nothing here is a method, and nothing here has a finish line I have picked out for you in advance.
However this ends up looking — a walk, a standing conversation, a gathering — it starts the same way, with you writing and me answering.