Dear 2023,
Wow! What a crazy time it's been. It feels like a lifetime ago that we first met, and yet here we are in your final hours, so much has happened and I am not the same person I was when we first met - in a good way. This time last year we were preparing and planning for everything we were going to achieve together - and now we're on the other side of it.
We started well, with a driving licence secured in the first month. Freedom and the open road were ours - and what a difference that has made. More spontaneity, more flexibility, more independence. Being able to go wherever, whenever and not be tied to timetables. I don't regret not doing it sooner, but I am pleased to have finally got there.
With a curacy announced and plans in motion, our first six months were mostly of endings as we prepared for beginnings. We finished off assignments, wrote a dissertation, worked extremely hard - all as we prepared to embrace the change that was coming. Tomorrow, once you've gone, I will have been a Deacon in the Church of England for exactly six months. Whilst this year has flown by, those first six months of you are a blur - another life entirely. As I knelt before the Bishop on that day six months ago my life changed, I changed. I was still everything I was, everything I had been, but suddenly I was different, now I was ordained.
The next six months were extraordinary. Tiring. But extraordinary.
I have never felt so 'at home' in a place so quickly. I belonged. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. There are a number of cliches we could share about this time, all would be right but completely inadequate to describe what the last six months have been like. I think at this stage all words are inadequate. I sometimes feel like you've been a
dream, that I will wake up tomorrow you'll be gone and will have taken the last twelve months with you. Of course I know that's not true, whilst you'll have gone the memories we made will forever stay, etched on my heart for a lifetime.
And so here we are, three hours remain. Then we welcome a new year, 2024. A year that promises to give as much as you did. A year of more 'firsts': first mass, first blessings, first wedding, first baptism. The next six months will be spent as the first six months with you were - preparing - preparing for that next step in the journey, ordination to the priesthood. I will spend the next six months a Deacon building on the foundation of the first, the foundation of my ordained ministry. Always a Deacon. The first six months we built together, taking everything we had learnt, everything we felt, everything we were, and we built a foundation - with a little help from Our Lady.
So, thanks. Thanks for being you, 2023, thanks for guiding me through the last twelve months - I couldn't have done it without you. Thanks for all the people you sent (and continue to send) to support me. It’s not been an easy year, in fact at times you’ve been particularly tough. Enjoy your last hours, and I look forward to what 2024 brings in your place.
Yours faithfully,
Kayleigh
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