Thank God for beginnings. Thank God for milestones and brand new calendars to draw our focus and intention.
I get that each new year is mostly an illusion, a mental trick to living better lives. I can totally get behind the reasoning that Every Day is the Best Day to Start Something New. Resolutions are SO last year, I MEAN, COME ON.
It’s a kindness, really, this symbolic start-over, a way to bracket all we wish to leave behind and begin, again.
Beginnings are fun. Beginnings are powerful, filled to overflowing with meaning and potential and rose-colored glasses. Thank you, God, for beginnings.
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Two of my favorite chunks of pure-poetry scripture start with, “In the beginning…”
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…
In the beginning was the Word…
Even though we, in our humanness, tend to timestamp everything, I, in my faithfulness, believe “in the beginning” is only the very best way our minds can absorb an infinite God. We assign a beginning to the story, all the while knowing we’ve dropped into existence somewhere near the end of it. We collect dozens of histories and letters and testimonies to compile a clear enough picture of a God radically bigger than any frame we hold up. God looms larger than what we can fit in our brains and hearts and hopes. He bleeds onto the next page and the next and the next, described in words we haven’t even invented yet, divine groanings only heaven comprehends. God did not begin.
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It’s tough — impossible, actually — to understand the depth of God’s all-knowledge, to wrap my small mind around God’s intimate awareness of every. single. detail. He is a grandiose God, extravagant in His interest and grace, His infinite attention drawn to me, and to you, so individually and completely it stuns the soul.
It’s a kindness to have the ear and the heart of this endless (and beginningless) God, my life and hopes and dreams a breath against the eternal, and the invitation He gives me to begin all over again.
It’s a kindness, all over again, to be made new.
Meet the Buttrams 