A new year!
It has been an inspiring, busy and great start to the New Year at our house. We had a wonderful Christmas season and we’re so appreciative of the generous love offering given to us by our church family. Two days after Christmas, Amy, Lydia and I were privileged to travel with our mission team from Wright’s Chapel to spend a week in Haiti. It was an inspiring, eye-opening, fun, depressing, disturbing, and challenging experience in so many ways; a blessing to be sure!
We were all tired when we got back, but we were also ready to jump into a new year, a new semester at school, a new church year with new possibilities in front of us. Amy and I at least have made a commitment to try and eat healthier and exercise more. (We tried to get Sophia on board, but she really doesn’t like the treadmill.) I’m trying to live my life each day with a greater sense of gratitude for the blessings that are in my life. I’m trying to start each morning as I rise out of bed with a prayer of thanksgiving and naming in my mind several things I am looking forward to in the day. I’m remembering my Haitian brothers and sister and am focused on trying to worry less and hang on to faith in God more. I said to my youngest daughter, Lydia, on one of our snow days as I stepped on the treadmill, “Yup, it is a new day with a new beginning!” Lydia, my soon to be 14 year old daughter, just kind of smiled at me and rolled her eyes and said, “Didn’t you say the same thing last year Dad?”
The truth is, I probably did say the same thing last year and maybe even the year before that and perhaps the year before that too. It is true that I, and I suspect many of us, often fall back into patterns of living that we say we wish we would change. Change is hard. But life long, transformative change in our lives and in our lives of faith is never possible if we don’t take the first steps. I would rather fail trying, than to never have tried. And with God’s help, perhaps this time the changes we seek will stick, for our God is known to be in the life transformation business.
I don’t know what changes you might be seeking to make in your life in this New Year. Maybe you are trying to make a change in order to better your relationships with your kids, your spouse or your coworkers. Perhaps you are seeking to make a change in getting better balance between home and work. Maybe you’re looking to make a change and be more intentional in how you plan your finances. I pray that some who are reading this might be seeking to draw closer to God and his son Jesus, perhaps seeking to make a greater commitment to a deeper life of faith. I pray our church can help you in reaching that desire for your life. Maybe that is a change you’ve sought before in your life and for a while maybe you made the change, you attended worship, you prayed, you read and studied scripture, you volunteered to serve others, but then “stuff” happened and you fell back into a pattern of living that didn’t include any of those things and you felt like a failure.
It is a new day and new beginning and so I hope and I know God hopes that you’ll try again. Making life changes is really hard, but we’ll never make those changes if we don’t try and often times try and try again. Yes, others may roll their eyes at us and point to our past failures, but our God is also the God of the future who sees hope and possibilities and a new life in front of us that sometimes we can’t even see.