By Amanda Cunningham

I was in a breakout group with a man who I knew who works in counselling and mission team leadership, and he asked after how our family was doing since we had both undergone transitions recently. He made a quip that would be considered funny in Member Care circles, “Where on the transition bridge are you?” I laugh. “Ha ha ha. I’m going backwards,” I throw back at him, and we all laugh some more. Aren’t we so funny? But it’s also true.

The transition bridge is a tool to help people in transition understand the complexities of big changes in their lives with the accompanying feelings and instability that comes with it. Stable ground on one side is normal life before the change is even considered, and stable ground on the other side is when life finally feels ‘normal’ once again. Planks on the bridge are labelled with various circumstances that can be encountered during change like ‘preparations’, ‘grieving’, ‘connecting with people who understand’, and ‘learning new skills’, all flowing over the ‘river of emotions.’ The imagery helps people talk through their experience and identify things that have or have not happened through their transition, and, despite my joke, it is actually normal to walk back and forth along the bridge before reaching a new normal, so going backwards is a real possibility.

Member Care in missions use the bridge a lot, as there are a lot of transitions in the international missionary life, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be limited to the area of overseas missions. The truth is everyone experiences transition all the time; a new job, a new school, marriage, growing families, death, job loss, moving house, etc. The principle of identifying our emotions and processing the experience in an active way can be applied to anyone’s personal transitions at any time.

Why should you choose to ‘walk’ over the transition bridge? Firstly, spending time recognizing that we are experiencing transition, and all the thoughts and feelings that come with it, allows us to acknowledge where we’ve been. This recognition allows us to identify all the varied emotions that might come when leaving something behind to move into something new; we can say thank you, goodbye, or this part of my life was hard.

Hopefully we can leave well and feel a sense of closure. Secondly, transition is when we can learn the most about ourselves and what we think and believe about things. When we are in a routine, we tend to turn our brains off and go with the flow, but change causes us to make more conscious decisions and notice what is going on around us.

Processing allows us to really understand how we’re doing, why we’re doing things and make positive course corrections if needed. Processing transition helps us grow. And finally, recognizing transition helps us give and receive grace. Change is hard, learning new things is hard and sometimes that requires extra energy and effort that also might be hard to find. We need to show ourselves extra kindness and patience, and we need to show others this grace as well.

Amanda Cunningham serves as a LAM staff member, specializing in Member Care. Amanda, Sam, and Craig moved from Bolivia to London, ON.

Image designed for LatinLink, based on the model by Marion Knell