New Beginnings

There is just something especially sweet about new beginnings. We have a fresh new year filled with pages that will record the happenings of our lives before us. None of us know what the new year will bring, but those of us who know God are assured that regardless of challenges that lie ahead of us, we can rest in the knowledge that God is with us.

There is a deep seated awareness of need and hope for change as most of us make resolutions of some kind. As I considered my own resolutions this year, I recalled Don coming home from a men’s breakfast and telling me something that Harold Youtze, Director of the Sioux City Gospel Mission, shared with the men present. Harold's goal is to read a different version of the Bible each year. On each page, he lovingly scrawls a little note to one of his children. Each of them have been blessed to receive one of Harold’s Bibles as a gift: A gift fully reflective of the legacy of a father who loves the Lord, each page containing some thought quickened to Harold’s heart by the Holy Spirit and/or something that Harold wanted to say specifically to them about what he'd read.

When I heard the story it deeply touched my own heart. Thus, this year, I pray that the Lord finds me faithful to complete year one of my own legacy of faith and my love for God’s word by beginning my own pilgrimage to leave each of my kids a Bible of the Lord’s choosing. I pray also that this will be a year in which I grow closer to the Lord; a year in which my heart is knit so closely with the Lord’s own heart that nothing can separate me from desire to serve Jesus.

I stumble so often . . . I fail . . . I fall . . . but the Lord’s faithfulness and mercy consistently give opportunity to regain my focus and make right my path. Because of Jesus, because of His blood, I can always count on the fact that while heartache, and foolishness, and fleshly reactions to unmanageable situations can soil my life’s pages, the sweet atonement of Jesus always provides fresh new pages for me, fresh beginnings with each new day, fresh opportunity to start again and pour out my love for God with my life’s fresh choices.