Brand New Year
Not January 1st New Year – but a brand-new school year! Lots of online photos of “first day of school” for many young students and even my Brennan’s first day of school at University of Mary Hardin Baylor.
I went into Walmart for a quick few items, and saw many parents and their children loading up their carts with school supplies. Where I live, providing school supplies by our residents was one of our do-good endeavors.
Raising two kiddos of my own, I clearly remember the excitement, stress, and potential the phrase “back-to-school” used to mean. This is a big week for a lot of families.
For people like me, it simply means I should pay attention to those blinking school-zone lights while I’m driving. And, also, for grandparents like us, it is attending sports and other activities that our grands are involved in. I might add that it is one of the joys of grandparenting – doting on them with pride and joy – performing and/or winning or losing their sports games.
As I see those “first day of school” photos and exhilarated moms and dads taking those photos, I think of these verses: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23
I thought about the fact that God created us to learn and grow and purpose to know Him more. One of the great joys of life is that every morning is a new opportunity.
But why don’t we always see the newness amidst the sameness? Those two verses of Lamentations offer a lesson about God’s greatness that all of us should learn.
Only God is both unchanging AND new. God’s love is steadfast, unceasing. The only thing in our lives that stays the same is God’s love. Everything else changes.
God’s mercies never come to an end. God could have made every person, every day, and everyone’s experiences the same. Instead, God created a complex, ever-changing world.
God’s mercies are new every morning. God wanted us to wake up every day with the knowledge that we can do and learn something new with our daily moments.
Great is God’s faithfulness. God created an always-changing world so we would understand that He is uniquely steadfast. The only thing in life that is unceasing is the powerful love of God. And His mercies are new every day.
The truth is “back-to-school” is for every one of us. Proverbs 18:15 says: “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”
In other words, never is there a day when wisdom allows us to stop learning. God is the only unchanging, steadfast “rock.” The Lord has something new to teach us about Himself today. We should be straining to fully experience that lesson.
God doesn’t want us to just hear, read, or realize His truths. He want us to take them into our hearts so that we fully experience God, and, to do that, we need to think about, ponder on, and strain to fully learn His steadfast, unchanging, but always-new mercies.
I’m thinking that we all need to go back to school today. Good news is we don’t have to go to the classroom, but we can open God’s Word, pray our way through the day and then we’ll experience God’s new mercies. And the same will be true for tomorrow. Let’s let God’s voice surprise us today. It’s a new day — and God is faithful.