This year has been anything but easy. Facing a divorce and sharing my experience with so many people hasn’t been easy at all. Divorce or a similar loss is often described as a failure, but I don’t see it that way. For me, failure is when you fall and stay on the ground, but to this day, I’ve always gotten back up. One thing I’ve experienced firsthand is pain. In the midst of pain, I’ve experienced transformation and, above all, God’s providence. Being vulnerable can make us look weak or fragile, but being vulnerable shows us the deepest parts of our being. Those feelings we’ve kept hidden and often forgotten or ignored. Trials take us to places we wouldn’t have thought we’d reach before, and surprisingly, we realize that place is precisely the place we’ve longed for. Suddenly, we look at our present and the steps we’re taking and discover that it was all part of a bigger and more beautiful plan than we could have ever dreamed. It’s difficult to build new dreams. It’s hard to let go and release people we would have liked to walk beside us on this journey of life. But as I wrote in my New Year’s blog, only the people God intended to be by our side will be, and letting go is an important part of making space to receive. Today is a day of rest, a day to restore the body from all the effort it has put in throughout the year. Today is the day to let go. Today a new chapter begins.