New Beginnings

What is a new beginning, other than the starting, once again, from the place where we are?

We can jettison the material circumstances, people, and places that up to this point have proved to be beneficial for rooting out sin in the way a grain of sand shines up a pearl….but we can also retain what continues to be helpful, encouraging, patient, and fortifying. We can separate the wheat from the chaff, and learn how to manage, going forward, both.

Beginning afresh means embarking each day with the curated understanding that not honoring red flags—ignoring them out of some mistaken sense of “spiritual should” or sentimental hope or unassertive kindly amiableness—as we did in the past—only anchors us to what was never have supposed to have been in the first place: obligations that were not responsibilities, commitments that were not a two-way street, toxic people we interpreted as us being the problem, when it was, all along, them (or at minimum, not just us). 

Our fresh start from today involves facing into reality: the ways we probably are not going to change because we aren’t supposed to change: general personality and demeanor, the foundational atoms that, all connected, make us who we are as individual souls.

But it also lets go of the parts of ourselves that have done damage, that were the train wrecks of life, that didn’t know what they didn’t know until they knew it. 

We open the airplane door and let this pernicious stuff descend without a parachute: to disappear into it’s rightful demise, never to be revisited again. 

We chuck immunity from immaturity, generating room now only for that which is being refined by the chisel of a source outside of ourselves and separate from the world around us.

We carry on, in other words, not as automaton-slaves with the mindset, “this is what Christians do, or what spiritual people do” (Romans 8).

Instead, we venture into yet another day with the vision of honed discernment, wisdom and logic, bathed in a warmth that gets, finally, what love is because love has been stripped down to its pure source: God Himself, His Son and His Holy Spirit. 

All those years of mixing love up: me, God, others, the corporate denomination that gathered in a building under a human authority, neighbors, peers, Jesus, family, the Holy Spirit….a tangle of allegiances and expectations coming from all camps! All of it generically thrown under the umbrella of “love.”

God, however, created me—all of us—not just in love but in logic, in a way that made sense to Him, so it can also make sense to me—to us. 

So then, all of life makes sense, and is sense, including love. Love is sensical because God is sensical.

Jesus gives us sight: he heals the blind, not so that we continue on in a new form of blindness but to proceed now with His vision, clarity and intelligence—His sense—which, in the end, is not very common; not common at all. 

Jesus’ uncommon sense is not sentimental, it does not subscribe to the motivation, “I’ll do this even though every fiber in my being is protesting that something here is not right.”

Jesus came so that we would have life, and have it to the full (John 10:9-10).

A full life, what is it? 

Is it, as many in Christendom seem to teach, a life only of sacrifice and incessant trial and error, never following what we sense is right and that passes with flying colors when tested against God and Scripture (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22; 1 John 3:21)?

How many folks are “serving God” miserably because they don’t want to be where they are, or with the people they’re with, but slog on because they are, in their immature mindset, earning their Christian stripes? When what they really want to do is pushed aside because it seems too pleasing, too selfish, too wonderful?

God’s Sabbath is a permanent rest that came with His creation. His sabbath is not a Saturday or a Sunday or one day, period. It is all of the time: the minute we enter His inner sanctuary through Christ we enter the sabbath (Hebrews 4).

That rest, the resting in God through Christ and His Spirit, means joy and increasing perfection of His love and logic in us: to, unashamed, since only God is good, have a Godly good time down here on this earth He created; to experience fully His joy by permitting the new heart, mind and spirit He has given us (Ezekiel 36:26-27; 2 Corinthians 3:3). 

And guess what? That means that we won’t always have chemistry with people simply because they are Christian. We will not be called to one specific mountain or mate. We will no longer crave human admiration and lower ourselves to self-promotion—often, in the past, camouflaged as humility as we served in our community of faith. 

We will no longer be the ones denying ourselves out of ill-conceived human and self-constructs (even Christian spiritual self-constructs).

All of that is over. Done. Finished. 

Through Christ, we deny the nonsensical and grow the sensical.

Dallas Willard writes:

“We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only insure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: ‘the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth.’ He constantly uses the power of logical insight to enable people to come to the truth about themselves and about God from the inside of their own heart and mind.” Dallas Willard, from his essay, Jesus the Logician.

It is in that acumen that we are free now to go where Jesus has desired us to go all along.

No longer will we be ignorant of temptations to strive in selfish ambition, but instead can flick them away as the fruitless attempts to earn the admiration of Christ and other Christians that they are. 

We will exchange our previous incorporation of ourselves into every aspect of life—even into our faith—exiting that bankrupt condition in favor of His camp, His outpost, His circulation, His embodiment.

That is the way to the effectual, ongoing change necessary to imbue each new day with just a little bit more birth than the day before. 

It is an underlying, continual birthing now sealed with Christ’s authentic humility, quiet exuberance, contentment, and yes, logic, not caring one iota about who sees and whether anyone  approves, free of all expectations, filled only with His today. 

“Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” (quoted in Hebrews 3:7).

What is a new beginning? 

It’s starting, once again, from the place where we are, only this time, with the articulation of Christ permeating. 

Copyright Barb Harwood