By Novel Writer Denise Turney

New beginnings are welcomed, celebrated. At the same time, they are feared, avoided. Have you ever dealt with a loss that you knew, deep down, you just knew, took the old you with it? It may have been the loss of a child, the loss of a parent, sibling or even the loss of a job that you’d worked for more than 30 years.

Please Leave Things the Way They Were

For you, there is no going back. If you’re particularly reluctant to release your former life, the only life you may have known, you might return to a former residence, seriously consider moving back home or seek out another job that reminds you so much of the job you just left.

The person who tries to toss out or move your deceased child’s clothes might be greeted with a powerful show of anger and distaste from you. “Leave it the way it is” might be your cry. It’s understandable.

Reinventing a brand-new life and evolving into new beginnings is no easy task. This reinvention demands that you examine your deepest beliefs. Yes. Get forced to let go of everything that you knew, and you will ask profound questions. It makes perfectly good sense. After all, the ground beneath your feet has shifted.

When Trusting New Beginnings Is Hard

Trust may be a hard to surface as you progress through your former life and move toward new beginnings. Love Pour Over Me‘s Raymond Clarke knows all too well about these awkward, painful adjustments.

It takes him a long time, decades, to learn to release his past life. Because of this, it takes him a long time to receive the love that awaits him, love he won’t receive until after one of the most important people in his life departs this world.

Are you at a crossroads? Or are you trying to cope with a painful loss? Perhaps Raymond’s story will speak to you. His story is the fictional account of volumes of real-life stories that fill newspaper, magazine and journal archives. Through his life you might find an answer that you are seeking.

New Beginnings – When You Experience Real Pain

You might find a path or technique that helps you to move forward, to enter a rewarding new beginning. As Raymond learns in Love Pour Over Me, be patient with yourself. It really does take courageous patience to advance into new beginnings.

Depending on the depth of the shift, you might start out feeling numb, detached from the loss. Crying might be something you rarely, if ever, do. This is a time when people around you (family, colleagues, neighbors, friends) might think you’re strong.

Because it reduces their need to alter their lives in order to deal with the great change you’re in the middle of, they may like you better this way versus seeing you sob. For this reason, meditating and spending time alone resting could be paramount as you move forward, never to be the same again.

Courageous Patience for the New Road Ahead

People you know might tell you that you really know how to trust God if you display little to no emotion around the loss. But they are only seeing your mask. And they might be grateful for that. Your mask rewards them with the illusion that things really haven’t changed that much and that after a certain amount of time, things will go back to the way they were before the loss occurred.

But that’s not going to happen. Ever.

Which is why it takes courageous patience to advance into new beginnings. Bless yourself with the patience to fall, get back up, fall again and wobble or crawl back up. Gift yourself with the patience to let your emotions rock, stand in the fear of the unknown and accept that you don’t now (nor ever did) know all there is to know about anything.

Favor yourself with patience as you struggle to release the past. Give yourself time to create a brand-new life. After all, this is a new life that you (not someone else) are going to live. Don’t rush it. Be exceptionally kind and gentle with yourself even if others are not.

Look For Cues

Look within for cues that you’re on the right path. Permit yourself to experience joy and happiness, even as you work your way through grief. Your courageous patience is a sign of self-love.

This same courageous patience might serve as a light to other people years from now. Your courageous patience to begin again might help to lead others out of a past that no longer works just as Raymond Clarke’s journey has done in the book Love Pour Over Me.