New

Listening suggestion: “All Things New” sung by Big Daddy Weave

“Summer and winter and springtime and harvest
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.”
~Thomas O. Chisholm~

“Now the Lord God had planted a garden.”
~Genesis 2:8~

Here’s to a new year, stretched out before us like an open landscape, the topography untouched, like a new journal waiting to be filled. This is just one exhilarating aspect for me about cross-country skiing:  setting out across a wide-open vista where you can almost see the stillness lay across a snowy landscape.

In Genesis 1:2, we read “Now the earth was formless and empty” (NIV). After a fresh snowfall, when I start out from my potting shed with donned skis and broad smile, it’s like I’m setting out into a “formless and empty” panorama, leaving a trail in the stillness. All New. The isolated terrain becomes inhabited, and on my return trip home, I reuse my original tracks, now familiar as an old friend. So is the previous calendar year to me: inhabited and familiar, and I can retrace my path through the months and the seasons as I look in that proverbial rear-view mirror. I relive the happy and wholesome, but I can also tend to revisit the tumultuous episodes and hit the repeat button on the hurt. This is helpful and healthy and ongoing to a degree, and it is important to process pain and trauma, but I also need to be intentional about turning some of the hurtful memories over to God, much as I would turn over the soil in a weedy corner of my garden. We surrender those painful parts so that we can move forward into a new season and from there, expect new and delightful fruit from the tending of our new garden of the coming year.

I felt this keenly last year while marveling at the lesson I learned from my garlic cloves that you can read more about here. As I wrestled over a conflict in my life, longing for closure, I felt the Holy Spirit prompt me concerning those cloves. I had planted the garlic cloves the previous fall. The day I planted my garlic, the garden bed was soggy. Weeks of dry that had yielded a concrete earth was followed by days of torrential rains, with a forecast of more rain, leaving me a narrow window for setting out the cloves, as well as a muddy mess of a garden; but there are even lessons in the mud, as Jesus used the humble humus of earth to heal the blind man. Life can be muddy and messy, at times, and as the gloppy mud heavily caked my garden shoes, I planted my garlic cloves, determined to offer up any blind spots for Him to heal my heart, also, and resurrect any ruinous circumstances in the relationships in my life. Down went the cloves into the cold, goopy dark, and as I covered them, I prayed:  Father, heal [this relationship]. It feels cold and lonely right now. Resurrect it to new life. Take what has been painful and use even the messy circumstances to make a miracle. Take what is caked in mud and misunderstanding and grow healing.

In Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, we find our protagonist facing a necessary move in his life, and he also used the garden metaphor to help him make that shift into a new season in his life.

“Making the garden completed my departure from Port William.
At that season I had naturally regretted giving up my garden in town.
I had mourned over it, remembering the way the fresh young plants had looked in the long rows behind the shop.
They had been art and music to me.
But now I had planted another garden in another place in a different kind of ground, and expectation pulled my mind away.”
~ Jayber Crow, p.582~

In this new year, give yourself permission to move forward instead of carrying the weight of yesterday’s mishaps, losses, grievances, and regrets. Learn new tools in moving past those hurts that cake your steps with the mud of mistakes, allowing God to lift you out of that “mud and mire,” because he sets your feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him” (Psalm 40:2-3).

May you have courage to learn a new song this coming year, to see what new thing God is going to do next in your life! May you have the courage to lift your eyes from the grief that has broken you to see what He is still tending in you! You may feel like you’re looking at this next year’s garden full of weeds, but listen to what He speaks over us in Isaiah 43:19:

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

And may you sing your garden spaces full with Psalm 13:6 praises:

“I will sing the Lord’s praise, for He has been good to me.”

“The end of winter may seem elusive, but it will give way …
to seed planting in spring.
So dramatic are the storms and uncertainties of our lives …
yet they are held in balance by the constancy
we experience in summer and winter,
day and night, seedtime and harvest—and, more importantly,
the faithful Lord who ensures it.”
~Shelley Cramm, God’s Word for Gardeners Bible, p. 24~

“One way or another, we are compelled to fill the emptiness,
to do something with the space.”
~Shelley Cramm, God’s Word for Gardeners Bible, p.2~