End of an era

Daughter Rebekah is making me a CD of Christmas music. On it is an Amy Grant song "Breath of Heaven" that I've appreciated since almost 20 years ago. When I listened to it yesterday the tears flowed as I realized how deeply my 'world' has changed in the last two decades.
I am at the end of an era of dependent kids; and at an end of an era of a particular kind of faith. My faith in God as a certain kind of Being who acts in specific ways of doing has been altered.
These are the words in the song that especially resonated at this last hearing and seem pertinent to my faith walk:

"Help me be strong;
help me be;
help me"

-I first wanted to be strong (live in the strength of the Lord, be strong in wisdom and discipline, be a good girl and good Christian), then
-I wanted to "be" (and I still desire to "be" more than "do," want to live in true self and be the real me that God made me to be), and next
-I want to just live in the 'help me' place (of simply looking to God, looking for Love and presence and togetherness with God, letting it be about Him/Her).

These couple of quotes seem relevant:

"Our faith is weak. Indeed, too often the weakest thing about our faith is the illusion that our faith is strong, when the "strength" we feel is only the intensity of emotion or of sentiment, which have nothing to do with real faith.

How many people there are in the world of today who have "lost their faith" along with the vain hopes and illusions of their childhood. What they called "faith" was just one among all the other illusions. They placed all their hope in a certain sense of spiritual peace, of comfort, of interior equilibrium, of self-respect. Then when they began to struggle with the real difficulties and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to "believe." That is to say it became impossible for them to comfort themselves, to reassure themselves, with the images and concepts that they found reassuring in childhood...

Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But is is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone... True faith must be able to go on when when everything else is taken away from us."

- Thomas Merton...New Seeds of Contemplation 189

The meeting of God is always, by definition, a journey into the unfamiliar. - St. John of the Cross