Untethered

​In an instant, my world was flipped upside down. Everything that was familiar –my purpose, my place in this world, my faith, even my identity – was suddenly and irrevocably stripped away from me.
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Or, perhaps, it was I who had been stripped away from life as I knew it. 

I was a leaf that had fallen away from the tree that had sustained my existence, determined who I was. I drifted slowly away from my tree – untethered, ungrounded.

Free floating, carried by the wind, I felt lost and alone in unfamiliar places. I watched my tree – the thing I had been connected to, the thing that brought meaning and life to me – shrink smaller and smaller as I drifted.

​But my gaze remained on that which was behind, the thing from which I had become untethered, until it was no longer discernable. No longer familiar.

​What will happen to me?

Where will I land?

What will I find there?

What will it be like?

I came to understand that I would never rejoin my tree.

But I found other leaves; those who had also become untethered, who had also floated on the wind.

Perhaps being untethered is an opportunity to find something new. Not by searching, but by surrendering to the wind – the very breath of God, this Spirit that hovered.

Perhaps to be untethered is to be more like Christ than being firmly attached to something else.

​Perhaps being untethered is not such a bad thing after all.