A New Year a New Wardrobe

A New Year…..A New Wardrobe

Greetings Friends and Family and Happy New Year! I hope this finds you all well and ready to dive into another year. Like many of you, I am looking forward to the beginning of a new year….a fresh start. Although sitting at the back of my mind of each new year is the fact that this will be another year without Mitch we will now embark on our 4th year without Mitch…..hard to believe, but painfully true. However, this year feels different to me, this year I have decided to don a new wardrobe going into 2011.

I am sure many of you have seen the show on TLC “What Not to Wear,” Meredith and I love to watch this show. For many years now it has been our Friday night tradition to get in our PJs and crawl into my bed and watch. Since it would be late some times Meredith would say “Mom, wake me up when they do the hair.” I love how Stacey and Clinton work their magic and turn frump in to FABulous but what I love the most is watching their victims go from low or no self -confidence to having an “I can conquer the world” attitude just by getting a new wardrobe.

I have been participating in a bible study about Ruth (Ruth: love, loss, legacy by Kelly Minter). Ruth was a Moabite who loss her husband, she willing left her hometown to care for her mother-in-law, Naomi, who not only loss her husband but her 2 sons as well. Their journey is a beautiful story of the human experience of love, loss and legacy with the divine hope of a redeeming God. If you are searching for a new bible study to do I highly recommend this one! This study has been an eye-opener and is how the new wardrobe comes in to play for me.

At one point in the story of Ruth her mother-in-law, Naomi, tells her it is time for her to move forward, it is time for her to find a new husband. Naomi tells Ruth to bathe, put on her finest perfume and a NEW dress. This new dress signaled a change, a readiness and availability for something new. She had been wearing her “don’t bother me I’m in mourning clothes” long enough. As I read this I had an “aha” moment. It’s been 3 years (and 3 months) since Mitchell passed away and I am still reaching into my closet to put on my mourning clothes. Some days I will even throw on my cardigan of self-pity. I knew right then and there those words were for me. I am not sure how to explain it but in that moment I felt a weight lifted off of me. The Lord was saying to me “Tracy, it’s time…..you’re going to love the new outfit I have waiting for you.”

God is not asking me to forget about Mitchell and telling me to “move on” (those 2 words have never set well with me but that’s a whole other blog entry). He has not removed my memories of Mitchell, but what He has done is taken the “sting” of his passing away. As stated in my Bible study “……after God has held us, healed us and lifted our heads, that we’d be ready to move forward with Him.” Not move ON but FORWARD there IS a difference and if you have walked the journey of losing a loved one or going through a divorce or whatever your heartache may be you know and understand what I mean.

My heart will always ache for Mitch and I am sure I will still have my tearful days but if I continue to sit all snuggled up in my mourning clothes and my not so cute, self-pity sweater then I am missing out! I am not allowing myself to be available to God and whatever he may have in store for me. I don’t want to get to the end of my journey and find that I was in the right place at the right time with all of the right resources to make an eternal impact but just not willing……still clinging to my wardrobe of mourning clothes.

For many of us our goal at the beginning of a New Year is to eventually be able to be in new clothes(hopefully a smaller size)before the year ends. My goal is to start off in my new outfit.  I am choosing not to dwell in the past clinging on to that old wardrobe, I am folding up that self-pity sweater and throwing it in the back of my closet (you never know when I might need to pull that one out J) and I am putting on the new outfit that God is holding out for me. Do you have an outfit that needs to be thrown out….or maybe even burned? Let God turn your frump into FABulous! And then you just might hear Stacy London’s favorite phrase “Shut the front door!”

Lord, make me willing to be willing!

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has past, the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17

Until next time, much love,

Tracy