A Chance to Start Life Over Again

So much of your time focuses on fixing things.  Under the weight of unfulfilled expectations, relationships sag, requiring you to prop them up.  Somewhere just beyond hope, dreams sit idly by, needing a push from you to get them into fulfillment.  Personal growth remains stuck in mediocrity, and guess who feels compelled to press forward anyway?

Prop up, push, and press.  Does this sound like the abundant life to you?

If only things in life broke one-at-a-time, perhaps you could carry the pieces with you and fit them altogether on the run.  But life doesn’t live sequentially or orderly.  Sometimes you wake up and find yourself carrying thousands of individual pieces, unaware of how they all fit together.  You don’t know where to start, so you stop starting.  You give up and settle.  You watch the life you always wanted slip by.

God created life to flow cyclically.

There’s nothing linear about it.

Time constantly sheds and renews.

What goes around comes around.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

The evening may let go of a sinking sun, but tomorrow wakes bright and early, full of morning light.  On its way to winter, autumn says goodbye to summer, but eventually springtime gets things growing again. We can only live three hundred and sixty five days before feeling the need to start over again at day one.

Something inside of you wants a second chance, a do-over, a new beginning.  You want to stop running the linear race leading to nowhere.  You long for a new life.

If you began this second life of yours, how differently would things look?  I imagine you’d cease with the fits-and-starts spiritually.  God would rightfully take His place at the head of your life, while you willfully followed behind.  Along with your self-efforts to please God, all the anxiety and worry would leave, replaced by peace and security.  For the first time, in a long time, you would just rest.  Relationships that once existed like a heap of twisted metal would straighten out.  No more codependency.  With all the time freed up from no longer looking to others for happiness and contentment, you would single-mindedly focus on God.

The changes this second life brings go on-and-on.  All the unwanted things exiting your life leave more room for God to expand.  After all, that is what you believe would solve everything, right, more Jesus and less of everything else?

I gave Him all the puzzle pieces and the image I had of spirituality, and in return, He gave me an entirely whole, put together life, one reflecting Jesus.

What you really want is a life that works.  You can call it whatever you will—a life of faith, abundant living, the spirit-filled life—but all second chance living must go through Jesus.  If not, you only get more-of-the-same; first life leftovers.  In Jesus, you realize all the hopes and dreams you had from the beginning.  No life lives better than the one that abides in Christ.

But what are you to do about all the puzzle pieces from the first life?

A simple turn of the calendar, from one year to the next, can’t sort-out your past, failed living.  Another New Year’s commitment to do better and try harder won’t make it out of January.  But instead of giving-up on your dream for a second life, why don’t you just give-up trying to fix your first life?

Each year at this time, something inside of you goes off, signaling the need to restart things.  Wiping the slate clean gives hope to the soul.  God made you this way.

But maybe this go-around, you’re reticent to follow your heart.  You want the second life, but fear more of the first.  Too many past failures have lowered your expectations for anything to change.

What you’re really asking is, “How can I begin a new life when so much of the old remains?”  After all, you still carry around all those mixed-up puzzle pieces from your first life.

I know what it’s like to have a heart going one way, while reality goes the other.  The second life of freedom remains just out of reach from a first life weighed down by past miscues and missteps.  You’ve accumulated so much junk in the first life, you feel obligated to take it with you into your second life.  You just don’t feel right declaring bankruptcy on all your past living and wiping the slate clean.

Yet, that’s exactly what you want.

You want a new beginning.

You want to be wiped clean.

The tension between future freedom and the obligation toward the past keeps you in a constant state of frustration.  You feel like you’re always leaving but never arriving.  Your past recommitments seldom manifest into present tense commitments.

One day I realized that the second life I wanted—the life that abides moment-by-moment in Jesus—makes no room for puzzle pieces from a past life.  You see, for years I lived as one of those Christians who felt obligated to fix everything in my life.  I looked at the spiritual picture on the front of the puzzle box that someone handed to me, and did my best to make my life look like what I saw.  But I never could get things to fit together to rightly reflect the spiritual image staring back at me.

When I discovered the reality of abiding in Jesus, that each moment allows me a clean slate, I no longer had any use for all the past I carried around with me.  I finally understood the goal was not to fix my life, but rather allow life to fix me.  Anytime I willingly gave God a piece of my old life, He took it and gave back an equal amount of the second life—the life I longed for.  Pretty soon, I just shoved the entire mess His way, and He shoved back a fresh, new life.  I gave Him all the puzzle pieces and the image I had of spirituality, and in return, He gave me an entirely whole, put together life, one reflecting Jesus.

What you need is something greater than a New Year’s resolution.  A way of living that works just as well in the first week of July as it does January.  You need a fresh, clean start EVERYTIME you need one.  That’s the promise God gives you in a moment-by-moment, abiding relationship with Jesus.

Abiding doesn’t require a do more try harder commitment, but rather a surrender of trying at all.  You can’t live the second life you’re destined for when playing by the rules of the first life you’re leaving.  It is Christ working through you that makes the second life go.

So go ahead and leave behind the past and enter into your awaiting future.  The only slate Jesus wipes clean is the one you’re holding in this very moment.  He just needs the green light to start erasing.