beginnings

My husband made the most beautiful coffee table for our living room. Unfortunately, you can barely see it underneath all my books and notebooks and journals and planners, all strategically placed withing reach for the upcoming year. Few things excite me more than a stack of blank notebooks.

I can't tell you how much I love the idea of a fresh start every year (or season or week.) I love newness - a newly organized closet, a new go-to Winter outfit, a new page.

And yet after I purge my closet and line up my new notebooks and think happy thoughts of the year to come, I wonder if maybe I'm being a bit silly. This "fresh start" talk, is it even real? Is this just one of those things we humans make up to feel like our lives are actually going in a specific direction as opposed to wandering aimlessly?

One of my goals for the new year was to read straight through the Bible. I was only on the first page of Genesis the other day when a verse struck me: "And God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years...'" (Genesis 1:14)

Seasons were part of God's original design for a perfect creation. I've never thought about that before.

For some reason, I think of change and seasons as a result of the fall of mankind, as a sort of plan B. Change, isn't that so often seen as a bad thing? But even before sin ever entered the world, God planned for us to go through seasons, literal and figurative. We were never meant to live static lives, even in Eden.

God doesn't roll his eyes when I get excited for a fresh start. A brand new year is his idea, his plan for us. This goal setting, this dreaming and planning - it's not in our heads. This fresh start we've been given is not only real, it's been given to us by God. And that's all the encouragement I need to dream big for the year ahead.