“Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” – Anne with an “e”
I love fresh beginnings, and I don’t think I’m the only one. For the past few weeks, the media has been overflowing with self-help remedies and resolutions that tend to sound like broken records. Stick with that diet. Exercise every morning. Work less and play hard because, in the end, family and friends are the only things that really matter in life. We hold on to the familiar but know that change is always necessary.
My family was holed up in our house for the entire break. When my sister rediscovered a few old family videos, we immediately began filling our afternoons by popping in tape after tape into the only VCR left on the face of the planet. I’d like to think that it was a type of “closure” for me… seeing several different versions of myself over a span of eighteen years. There happened to be a consistent documenting phase during my most awkwardly petty season, and I found that, for once, I preferred the current version of myself over the fantastical version from my childhood that I often glorify when nostalgia sets in. Although I had a “Narnia childhood” (as one friend named Rebekah put it), I couldn’t be more thankful to experience a different, more realistic spin on growing up. Change. I want it– the entire package.
“It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.”– C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
The idea of change has always scared me. But, what scares me more than change itself is the possibility of being left behind by it. I suppose that’s why these simple words in Malachi 3:6 have a resounding message with me, “I, the Lord, never change…” More so, He is unchanging in His compulsion to make me change.
“The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.” – C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
Over Christmas break, I was overwhelmingly struck with the reality of sin in the world. My girls’ Bible study visited a widow in our church and sang a few songs to her. We talked, and she let us explore her house, allowing us to find in each nook a wealth of antique trinkets. But, more than that, we listened, we looked, and we saw the effects of a sin-eaten world. Mrs. Mary told us the story of her daughter, who never quite felt forgiven and so let drugs swallow her joy. She is kind and a dear Christian lady, but she is not unaffected. I am not unaffected. There is emptiness in the nonspecific mantra, “Peace and good will to all men,” when we know that all men do not feel peace. They dream of change and are not able to accomplish it.
Like Lewis, I am also “a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” And I’m sure we often are confused in thinking that our “Narnia childhoods” should be exchanged for adulthood. My friend Heidi encouraged me to read Surprised By Joy, where Lewis abolishes this myth. He describes joy as being an unsatisfiable desire that is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. The past is often filled with mere reflections of true joy. Yet, this joy is not dependent on our pasts, but on the object of that joy, which transcends all (even the categories of our human existence). The more Lewis realized that this joy was an object outside of himself–outside of his fantastical land of Boxen and his glorified past– extroversion was made possible. He discovered Joy (or rather, Joy discovered him), and change was a natural fruit. “Peace and good will to all men, with whom He is pleased.”
My sister has an annual ritual of reciting T.S. Eliot, just before the final countdown of the new year: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
The ADBC Girls’ Bible Study has been studying Romans for the past few months, and it remains a favorite subject of Paul’s to bring up the need for a new beginning. In order for true change to take place, we must bring certain things to their end. Namely, ourselves. The end is where we start from.
“In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.– Romans 6:11-14
Eliot begins to make sense. The fact that there is a struggle to not let sin reign in our mortal bodies suggests that being “alive to God” is not only a status but a process. And, that is why I am thankful for new years and fresh tomorrows.
In August, I found some fat, grubby caterpillars in my mother’s garden. Joel and I put them in jars, harnessing twigs that acted as branches against the Mason glass walls. After a few days, the jars began to stink. Those chubby creatures had eaten the entire food supply we had given them and more. I considered the project a lost cause (like my many attempts to grow a plant) after I saw steamy condensation dripping off of the jars and onto the window seal. It all became repulsing to me, and my interest was only piqued again when I happened to glance at my jar and see three cocoons as I walked out the back door one day. A week or two passed by, and a few of the cocoons had hatched. But, I had not been around to witness my new friends leave. There was one left.
It happened when no one else was around. I came home from work early and walked through the door, only to find a butterfly struggling to force its wings through the rim of the jar. I freed it, and he rested on my index finger for a good forty-five minutes. Nature had never felt that comfortable with the close proximity of my presence, so I relished the experience on my front porch, marveling at what I formerly had known as “fat” and “grubby.” I could not reconcile myself to the fact that this butterfly was the same creature. There were no traces of the past behind. Periodically, I would set him down on the slate porch tiles to dry out his wings. He seemed uncertain, however, so I would always end up picking him back up and observing him closely as he perched on my finger. It was as if the caterpillar had died, and something else had been reborn inside that cocoon before re-emerging. It seemed re-awakened and alive to an entirely new world. A miracle.
“Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). The message of Christmas moves fluidly into the New Year. I’m glad we’re not historically correct in the timing of this holiday, because a week later, we’re reminded that the way for peace and joy was not paved by filling in the pot-holes of an old road, but by building an entirely new thoroughfare, reaching up to the sky. Its pilgrims, always gaining ground.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” -T.S. Eliot