From the Rev Sharon Grenham Toze, an Anglican priest and prison chaplain:

"There’s quite a lot of change going on in my family at the moment. My youngest is due to start school in September, so she’s been visiting her new classroom. My eldest son’s taking his A levels and looking ahead to university. My husband has a ‘significant’ birthday tomorrow and I’m starting a new job in a couple of weeks.

All of these life events mean that we’re saying goodbye to the old way of doing things, and having to rework our routines, our bedroom allocation (!), and, I suppose, the way we see ourselves. It’s a bitter-sweet time really, there’s that sense that each of us is standing right on the threshold of a new era, and it’s both exciting and scary, and even a bit sad, all at the same time.

Change is difficult, there’s no doubt about it. Sometimes we want things to move on, but sometimes we have no choice and we’re faced with a whole new ball-game that we never bargained for. You know, maybe we lose our job, or a relationship breaks down. Maybe someone we care about dies, or becomes seriously ill. Suddenly nothing’s the same, yet we desperately wish it was. If only, and all that.

In the end, we can’t stop these things happening. There’s not always a reason, or a redeeming feature when something bad happens, and even a positive change can still be hard to cope with at the time. It’s normal to feel a whole range of emotions when life gets turned upside down. But spending too long looking back wistfully, or being angry or resentful about whatever’s happened will freeze us right on the doorstep – in that state, we can’t go back, but we can’t go on either. There comes a time when we have to say goodbye to the old ways – we can’t move on without letting go."