August can be to the calendar year what Sunday night is to the week. With the impending end of the weekend, it’s easy to experience dread as your thoughts turn to work. You start adding items to your to-do list. Or worrying about an impending project deadline. Or beating yourself up that you still haven’t knocked off that five-minute task that “you’ll get to when you have time.”
Just like the start of a new week can be tinged with the “Sunday scaries,” there can be a similar anticipatory anxiety in August with going back to school. For churches, it likely includes the busyness of planning and the last-minute rush toward the start of the “program year.”
Crossing the threshold from Sunday night into the work week, or August into the school year, parallels the transition of getting out the door each morning. If you’ve ever felt the frustration of knowing you’re going to be late because your kiddo is struggling to get her shoes on (yet again), you know how fraught this part of the morning can be.
These transitions mark the end of a slower rhythm—whether the weekend or summer’s ease—and signal the beginning of something new.
They are also beginnings, often moving us from ease to obligation, freedom to structure, fun to responsibility. And here’s the thing about these moments: Transitions can be tough. Why? Because they represent change.
The human brain is physiologically wired to resist change. For ancient humans, any change in the environment could mean danger. Change in the weather? Death by drowning in a flood. Change in tribal alliances? Death by an armed raiding party. Change in your social status? You guessed it. Death by being kicked out of the tribe and left behind. So of course, you dread the end of summer as the calendar turns from August to September. It makes a lot of sense. So if transitions are tough, and the brain is wired to code them as threats, how can we support ourselves through these moments with God’s help?
Ritual helps us navigate transitions and reminds us of God’s presence in times of change. And in the productivity as personhood, busyness as a badge of honor culture in the United States, receiving the support of a ritual requires slowing down long enough to take it in. Rituals already abound: Labor Day barbeques mark summer’s end, Sunday worship starts the week, and first day of school photos mark a new academic year.
What might it look like in your life to lean into a small, simple ritual in the transition from one thing to the next? To remind yourself and your family that God supports your movement through change? That there is no horizon you might set off toward where God has not already been?
This kind of ritual requires taking a moment to slow down and come back into the embodied present. Part of what can make Sunday night feel so fraught is the disconnect between your mind and body. While your body might be sitting at the dinner table with your family, your mind is already reviewing tomorrow’s meeting schedule.
The key here is to keep it simple. If it requires a liturgical rubric, scratch it. A Sunday night ritual might be doing a puzzle together as a family, enjoying a last moment of togetherness before the bustle of the week. A back-to-school ritual might be going around the dinner table, sharing gratitude from the summer and an intention for the academic year. A getting-out-the-door ritual might be singing a silly song together as you move through those final preparations to get out the door with your kids. The key is that your ritual moment returns you to your body and the present. It returns you to relationship, with yourself and your loved ones, and with God. It returns you the tenderness and kindness that ease the change.
So the next time you find yourself in anxiety, dread or rushing as you move from one thing to the next, notice the transition. Normalize that it’s tough. And practice a short, simple ritual to mark the passage, reminding yourself that God is with you through it all.
Discussion Questions:
1. Where do you notice the regular moments of transition in your life? When do they happen? What are they like?
2. How can you normalize for yourself that transitions represent change? And that your body/brain will likely resist that change?
3. Where might you slow down for a moment to support yourself through this transition? What simple ritual might invite God’s presence into that moment?
Closing Prayer:
God of Change, you are a God who is constantly on the move.
You are growing, shifting, creating, always in motion.
We often grow weary of change.
We resist the transitions in our lives,
our thoughts inspiring dread and anxiety.
So hold us with tenderness through these moments.
Help us to remember that your arms are wrapped around us,
especially through the unknown.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Drawing from her previous experience as a seminary professor, Dr. Crystal Hall helps bridge the gap between what women know intellectually and the actions they want to embody, to create truly sustainable ministries. She’s a certified coach and holds a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in New York. Crystal lives on the Connecticut shoreline with her husband, their son and their cat, Lady Blue.