And what a great feeling to be back at work!

And… what a great feeling to be missed by the team at Safeway, and to be excited for what the new year can be. This week was definitely a win and the way I hope you all started your new year.

I started with ServiceMaster by Desert Dry on Tuesday, and really what a great group of professionals. From Jon and Dan who own the business to the team they’ve built, I feel like I’m in the right place, and that hasn’t happened for a while.

As I consider my OLW for the year, I am looking forward to exploring dependence… and independence and much like the sermon at church today, that independence isn’t just a good thing that relegates a state of dependence to being something negative.

Let me explain…

Today Gary, one of our deacons was speaking on where we draw our narratives from, good and bad, right and wrong… and how a strong sense of faith depends on the written word, tradition, and my ability to reason those things with my experiences and place in the world. That in the beginning, there was God created the light and called it good… and that left to our human understanding that relegates the dark to being negative…and I’m not sure that’s true. Dark is different… and we need that. If not for the dark would we be able to appreciate the millions of stars in the night sky or a beautiful harvest moon. If not for the dark, would we see the beauty of fireworks and shooting stars… without the dark we’d miss out on striking sunrises… without the dark, the Star of Bethlehem may have not been visible to guide the Shepards and Magi to the manger where a sleeping baby and Savior for the world would lay.

So what’s the point??

Darkness and light live together in a beautiful relationship that each gives the other what it needs. The same is true of independence and dependence. Neither are exclusively good, nor are they exclusively bad, they are partners in a wholistic truth that”s our life.