Perhaps now, more than ever, we are conscious that we are in a season of change. Whether we are hearing it from friends, the media or indeed from within ourselves, we sense that once this is all over that things are not going to be the same as they were beforehand, there is even a longing for this to be true. When speaking of change in the current context, it is not the superficial that we are referring to, such as more people working from home, riding their bicycles to work or doing online shopping. It’s not an evolution in our exterior life but an interior shift that will in due course undoubtedly have exterior implications. Much of what many of us are sensing still remains largely beyond our intellectual grasp, dwelling in the realm of the intuitive, just far enough out of reach that we cannot adequately articulate with words what we are beginning to discern with our hearts. Yet somehow we know that there is a larger place, an increase of being, greater freedom of movement and expression, expanding the capacity of our hearts and God’s life within us.

The two greatest transitions we experience in life are birth and death. Both take us from the restrained to the liberated, from the confined to the unimpeded. The child within the womb is blissfully ignorant of the larger world that awaits it, only aware of its immediate reality; arms and legs snugly curled in upon itself, enshrouded in warm darkness, suspended in amniotic fluid, listening to the reassuring sound of its mother’s heartbeat. For the child in the womb such an existence appears to be life in all its fullness, that is until it is rudely woken from its slumber, an open door thrusting it forth to draw its first breath in a world far vaster than its wildest imaginations.

Death is also birth. The first century church celebrated the day of our death as the day that we are truly born again. As such, physical death is an expansion of a far superior magnitude to physical birth, we being so much larger on the inside than we are on the outside. Our physical bodies are also a type of limiting womb, confining within them a much greater reality, a spiritual existence so vast that the Trinity are able to make their home within us. Referring to physical death, the Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft writes,

“I must die to be born. The body must die because it has served its purpose and is worn out like the placenta… It is good that [the body] ages before it dies, for that makes it easier for us to abandon it. We naturally cling to it [but] we learn detachment from the old womb when the time for birth approaches.”[1]

As such, death and birth are mysteriously intertwined in an inseparable embrace, one delivering us gently into the hands of the other, enabling us to expand into the fullness of who he has created us to be. In this season of expansion, Father is extending the tent pegs of our hearts, enabling us to let go of our former confined existence and beckoning us tenderly into a much broader setting.

Like death and birth, seasons of personal transition are deeply personal and usually private. Even the animal kingdom withdraws to give birth and to die, and in this season of change and expansion, he is saying to many of us, ‘Come away with me my love’, ‘Let me lead you into the wilderness’, ‘Be still’, ‘Lie down’, ‘Allow me to speak tenderly to you.’[2] In many of our nations, cities and towns lockdown is beginning to end, but Father is saying this is just the end of the beginning…

[1] Peter Kreeft , Love is Stronger than Death, Ignatius Press – San Francisco 1992, Page 78

[2] Song of Solomon 2:10; Hosea 2:14; Psalm 46:10 and 23:2.