Day 11: The roles you have had

Reflect

Over a lifetime we play many roles: child, friend, student, parent, neighbour, colleague, volunteer, professional. Each one shapes us. Each one also comes to an end or changes shape, sometimes by choice and sometimes not.

The old writer in Ecclesiastes says that for everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. It can sound like a platitude until you are in the middle of a season ending. Then it reads more like a permission slip. It is allowed to be a time of change. It does not mean something has gone wrong.

Seasons end, but you are not erased with them. Think of the roles you have already left behind. A school, a first job, a stage of family life. You are not the same person you were then, but neither did you vanish. Something carried through: your character, your habits of care, the things you love, the way you treat people.

That carried-through part is closer to who you are than any title. It is made of values, loves, skills and ways of being that travel with you from role to role. It is what other people actually valued about working with you, even when they described it by your job.

So today, rather than mourning only the role, look for what is bigger than the role. What did you bring to it that was yours? What did you learn about yourself inside it? Those things have not been made redundant.

You may find that the role was one expression of something much deeper, and that the deeper thing is still here, waiting for its next form.

Verse

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:”

Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV)

Journal

List the main roles I have held, at work and elsewhere. For each, what did I bring that was truly mine, and what have I carried through?

One small action

Write the names of three roles you have had on separate lines. Beside each, write one quality you brought to it that is still true of you now.

A 60-second breath prayer

Breathe in: “There is a season for this”

Breathe out: “and you are in every season”

Breathe slowly for about a minute, saying the first line as you breathe in and the second as you breathe out.