The fall morning greeted me with a smile and a slap on my shoulder as I stepped outside. Quickening my pace, I hurried around the side of our house, hoping to see the sun peeking over the eastern sky.
“Ahh,” I inhaled the crisp air, “a brand-new day.”
Not every morning is like this, so I am grateful for the ones that reach deep down in my bones and, like a salve on sore muscles, soothes the soul.
This one happened on a Sunday.
“What if this were my first Sunday in this place?” I imagined. “What if I had just moved here? What if this town was one big question mark–filled with people I didn’t know and places I’d never been? What if I had this one opportunity to be here for these people? What if ALL things were new?”
The adrenaline began to pump through my veins, giving me a new lift in my step and a cheery “top-of-the-morning-to-you” kind of pep in my voice as I whispered aloud to myself: “I get to preach today.”
A little later, I noticed my wife peering out the front window.
“Whatcha doing?”
Someone was moving in down the street.
“Just call me Mrs. Kravits,” she laughed, referring to the likable snoop on Bewitched.
Then she asked, “Remember what it’s like to move into a new place?”
I hadn’t told her about my “all things new” fantasy from earlier that morning.
She continued, “Remember how it is to have that excitement that says, ‘We get to live here; we get to move to this place; we get to meet new people.'”
I took note of her repeated phrase, “I get to.”
Maybe that’s part of the perspective that empowers us into an “all things new” kind of mindset: an attitude of gratitude, clearing the mind of those stale cobwebs that drape our thinking with a drab sameness.
If I’m not thoughtful, I get stuck in a rut so that even a mindful mantra like the one credited to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, can be said by rote memory, without thought or feeling. “Waking up this morning, I smile,” I repeat each day. But now I deliberately slow down for the rest of it: “Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
“Twenty-four brand new hours,” I slowly repeat, stopping to meditate on those two words: “Brand new.”
Paul, the Apostle, wrote that in Jesus Christ, “all things are new” (2 Corinthians 5:17), for in Him, we are new creations. And Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born anew by the Spirit from above (John 3:3).
My perspective gets stale; my self-focused thinking limits my vision to the way things are, have been and presumably, will be. But when I yield to the Spirit, He renews me, not just that one time, way back when, but every day, from within, as I “lift up mine eyes unto the hills” (Psalm 121), that land of possibility.
The ground seems to move a little quicker under my feet; the people I’m with are the same, but they seem different, too, and that sun that’s risen every day of my life and for billions of years before me, well—it seems like today is its first day to shine.
Sure, that same old crick in my neck pains me, and my morning stretches tell me I’ve blown out a few birthday candles. Still, I’ve got fresh eyes, at least for today, and though I may see what I’ve already seen and feel what I’ve already felt, though all things are the same, they are also all at once and forever, always new.