Happy New Day
Happy New Year. New Year, New decade. New day.
Really, it's just a new day.
It's funny how much hype and hoopla attends the changing of this one particular day of the year. As though the writing of a slightly different number for the year makes a monumental difference of any tangible sort.
It's all about hope, of course. Hope for a better year. Which is to say, hope for a better tomorrow. I can't hope much for the year. It doesn't make sense to me. A year is an incredibly long brief span of time. They gather and accumulate around one's feet (or mid-section) until we are buried by them. An old Norse poem compares the span of one's life to a sparrow flying unexpectedly in through one end of a mead hall, and continuing it's flight straight through and out the other end, back into the coldness of night. For that brief span of time, the bird knows the warmth of fire and friends, the merit of valor and honor, the intensity of love itself, and then it is gone again, back into the uncertainty and unfathomability of night. Such is our life. Or so the story goes.
But we only experience that life one day at a time. Whether you live to be 120 or experience what people refer to as a premature death. One day at a time. One hour at a time. One moment at a time. And in that moment, that hour, that day...things might be new and different. Or they might not. You might be new and different. Or you might not. But it's only determined a moment at a time, not a year at a time.
I can have no reasonable hope for the new year if I don't have a reasonable hope for a new day. As I drove to work this morning, my town looked much the same as it did yesterday, and the month before, and six months earlier. A few less cars on the road because of the holiday. But the sun rises and sets, and nothing has really changed from yesterday.
And yet everything has changed. I live with the hope that I am recreated in the image of the Son of God. I live with the hope that regardless of how many or awful my failures, I am offered forgiveness and the promise that one day, these failures will cease. One day, the crust of sin that emanates from my heart will be broken away, and I'll emerge new and clean, once and for all. And until that time, I have the hope that I can make real changes in this moment. In this hour. In this day. Real changes that when stacked together, add up to a different year than last year.
The same, but different. That's the irony of a new year, to me. That's why so many people fail at their valiant new year resolutions. They try to encompass a year of change in a statement, forgetting that this change is only lived out one moment at a time, one decision at a time, one prayer at a time. The year only comes in bite-sized pieces, and if we forget that, we choke on the enormity of time, on the enormity of the change that we hope and pray for in our lives.
May your hope for the differences you will experience in this day, the changes in thinking and feeling and behavior, be grounded in someone much larger than you. Someone who has already encompassed all that today might bring, and waits in each moment ready to hold you up and encourage you and speed you on your way. May your hope spring not from some vague hope that you can make yourself different, but in the bold confidence that the Holy Spirit of the Son of God who loves you enough to have died for you is beside you, within you, beneath you, above you, and behind you to help accomplish in and through you what you could never have done on your own.
Happy New Day!
Really, it's just a new day.
It's funny how much hype and hoopla attends the changing of this one particular day of the year. As though the writing of a slightly different number for the year makes a monumental difference of any tangible sort.
It's all about hope, of course. Hope for a better year. Which is to say, hope for a better tomorrow. I can't hope much for the year. It doesn't make sense to me. A year is an incredibly long brief span of time. They gather and accumulate around one's feet (or mid-section) until we are buried by them. An old Norse poem compares the span of one's life to a sparrow flying unexpectedly in through one end of a mead hall, and continuing it's flight straight through and out the other end, back into the coldness of night. For that brief span of time, the bird knows the warmth of fire and friends, the merit of valor and honor, the intensity of love itself, and then it is gone again, back into the uncertainty and unfathomability of night. Such is our life. Or so the story goes.
But we only experience that life one day at a time. Whether you live to be 120 or experience what people refer to as a premature death. One day at a time. One hour at a time. One moment at a time. And in that moment, that hour, that day...things might be new and different. Or they might not. You might be new and different. Or you might not. But it's only determined a moment at a time, not a year at a time.
I can have no reasonable hope for the new year if I don't have a reasonable hope for a new day. As I drove to work this morning, my town looked much the same as it did yesterday, and the month before, and six months earlier. A few less cars on the road because of the holiday. But the sun rises and sets, and nothing has really changed from yesterday.
And yet everything has changed. I live with the hope that I am recreated in the image of the Son of God. I live with the hope that regardless of how many or awful my failures, I am offered forgiveness and the promise that one day, these failures will cease. One day, the crust of sin that emanates from my heart will be broken away, and I'll emerge new and clean, once and for all. And until that time, I have the hope that I can make real changes in this moment. In this hour. In this day. Real changes that when stacked together, add up to a different year than last year.
The same, but different. That's the irony of a new year, to me. That's why so many people fail at their valiant new year resolutions. They try to encompass a year of change in a statement, forgetting that this change is only lived out one moment at a time, one decision at a time, one prayer at a time. The year only comes in bite-sized pieces, and if we forget that, we choke on the enormity of time, on the enormity of the change that we hope and pray for in our lives.
May your hope for the differences you will experience in this day, the changes in thinking and feeling and behavior, be grounded in someone much larger than you. Someone who has already encompassed all that today might bring, and waits in each moment ready to hold you up and encourage you and speed you on your way. May your hope spring not from some vague hope that you can make yourself different, but in the bold confidence that the Holy Spirit of the Son of God who loves you enough to have died for you is beside you, within you, beneath you, above you, and behind you to help accomplish in and through you what you could never have done on your own.
Happy New Day!
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