A New Beginning
by David Baer | published: Friday, December 27, 2013, 12:00 AM
It’s almost a new year, and new calendars are going up on the wall, with more untouched white than a field covered in fresh snow. The days are circumscribed in tidy little boxes, all laid out in rows, but apart from the occasional holiday, there is no content laid out for them. These days, my calendar lives online in the “cloud,” so that I can access it anywhere, and it doesn’t stop when the year does. There is no reason why I can’t start filling 2014 (or 2015 or 2016 for that matter) with events. But I still have a psychological barrier with the coming of January that I don’t have with any other month, such that the new year never becomes real and solid for me until it’s here. And so the new year brings a new beginning.
We embrace the idea of a new beginning. This year, this year, we tell ourselves, we are going to lose weight, to start the new career, to meet someone. The blank calendar stares back at us with so much promise and possibility, unsullied (so far) by distractions and failures. But will the days of the new year correspond with our hopes, or will they go astray? We like the idea of a new beginning, but it’s hard to know whether our plans and resolutions have staying power.
The apostle Paul wrote about new beginnings to his friends in Corinth. Maybe “friends” is putting it generously—this was a very complicated relationship. One of the members of the Christian community had publicly insulted Paul in a way that undermined his authority, and he had spent some time away to let things cool. He wrote to them and laid out the hurt they had caused him, and they responded with their own expressions of regret. In time, they demonstrated their respect for and trust in Paul by contributing to a charity fund he was organizing in support of the poor Christian believers of Jerusalem.
Looking back on the ups and downs of this relationship, Paul sees the power of Christ to make a new beginning: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Old wounds and hurts lose their power to limit and define us. Forgiveness breathes life into old relationships. Destructive ways of living and relating to others lose their grip on us. New life takes root and blossoms. And this new beginning doesn’t have to happen on January 1. It can happen January 2, or December 31, or on Friday the Thirteenth. “Now is the acceptable time,” Paul writes, “now is the day of salvation!” (2 Corinthians 6:2).
It is good to have hopes and goals for the new year. But as you work on those goals, know that God is working on you, making smooth the rough places in your life, according to God’s own schedule and design. Your new beginning is already underway. Sometimes it takes faith to believe this, when the old hurts still feel so present, but the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion (Philippians 1:6). Sometimes you need to act—and when you need to, you will. Sometimes you just need to relax and trust that God is at work.
May the new year bring you every blessing, and may God lead you into a new beginning!