Again we begin a New Year. Life is a series of new beginnings really. That is a comforting thought to me. There have been many times in my life I have messed up, or something has happened somewhat beyond my control, but which nevertheless severely affected me. At many such moments of difficulty I wanted to give up. The moment was too overwhelming and I discovered myself trapped, stuck in that moment in time like it was some prison. The prison of course was my own creation. No moment can hold us, but we allow the circumstances of moments to haunt us, to grab onto our thoughts and our dreams and steal them from us. In those quiet moments of desperation when peace seems fleeting at best, or nowhere at worst, we exist fearing how life will play out, how life will continue, how we will ever make it.
Yet each of us has made it through such valleys before and will make it through them again, it is the nature of life. Sometimes life is miraculous, pregnant with promise and potential. We might call such moments our mountaintops of glory. We have all experienced them, and God willing we shall all experience them again. A graduation, a birth, a chance encounter with God, only you know your mountaintop experiences, oh and what experiences they must have been. I have found myself high atop such mountains and in my jubilation I have seldom seen the valleys down below. Nevertheless there are always valleys down below because the truth is life is a journey and not a destination. Below each mountain is another valley, and beyond each valley is another mountain, and we keep walking because that is what we do.
So the New Year arrives and I am reminded that I keep on walking, because that is what I do. Somehow God walks with me, pushing me along when I would rather collapse in despair, pushing me along when I would cement myself in joy, pushing me along because there is so much still to experience. Not every day will be easy, but as the pressures of life are overcome, like a piece of coal that becomes a diamond only under severe pressure so shall we one day discover that we have become a jewel of infinite worth. Life is a series of new beginnings, and while the journey we have already travelled has helped create who we are, it is the journey we have yet to travel that will eventually make us complete. Each of us is a work in progress, and God would not have it any other way, and should we be truly honest neither would we. Something about the pains have allowed the joys to be so much better, and something about the joys have allowed the pains to contain some amount of meaning, even if words cannot express what that meaning may be.
However there is only one way to keep on going, and that is to humbly walk with God. Without that ever-vigilant and ever-present partner we would be lost. So let us say with the psalmist, “My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise!” I have seen many scenes in movies where a frightened character is told by the protagonist something like, “Keep looking at me, keep looking at me.” The goal of course is that the fear might stop overwhelming the poor character who cannot handle the situation. In our difficulties it is God who says, “Keep looking at me, keep looking at me!” If we look then we will be able to sing and give praise in the pain because our hearts will be fixed on God, and then at some moment we will notice the valley is over and again we are climbing up a mountain, a new mountain, a new beginning, as a new person. When we get to the top of the next mountain we still must sing that same psalm and God will still say, “Keep looking at me, keep looking at me!” because that moment no matter how glorious will be better with a friend.
I hope and pray that this year is full of new beginnings for each of us, and from whatever befalls us in the course of this year we emerge on the other side a more precious jewel than we entered it.
Riding the Wave of the Holy Spirit,
Garrett
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