Made New Again

It's incredibly easy to be swept away by the rush of the Christmas season. Each year seems to build off of the momentum of the last, and while precious memories are formed away and outside of the commercial aspects of the holiday, we routinely fall victim to the red Starbucks coffee cups and after-hour shopping mall visits for obligatory gifts for friends and family. Tis the season, right?

Recently, someone close to me shared that they place great emphasis on New Year's Day and go farther out of their way to celebrate, decorate, and commemorate that holiday rather than it's predecessor seven days earlier. Both (what I would assume) are God-fearing people and no doubt press pause to give thanksgiving for the birth of Jesus Christ, the most influential and interesting man who ever lived. Yet, both also show great discipline during the commericalized holiday and announced that this year was the first that they had purchased gifts for one another in four years. And by "gifts", I mean gift, solo, singular. This was shared during a Christmas Eve dinner where behind our fully-loaded dining room table stood an 8-foot decorated Oregon Blue Spruce tree packed with dozens of gifts for a small family of five. Christmas, rooted in meaningful traditions that comfort and relax the soul, is big in the Johns household and if something goes missing (early risings, stuffed stockings, 24 hours of "A Christmas Story", a great meal, and vegging out in front of the TV) it ultimately takes away from the day.

I read this morning a passage out of the book of 1Peter that led me to think of putting something back into the meaning of New Year's Day and new beginnings. There's something powerfully refreshing about starting over again, a re-cleansing, rebirth. As the ball drops in Times Square, people get all crazy in the head and start all over; a new calender year seems to fossilize all that happened in the year before as "the past" in a way that has no immediate impact on the present. Resolutions are our way of hitting the reset button on all that we are ashamed of or feel great disappointment in (Donald Miller, author of "Blue Like Jazz" and other enjoyable reads, posted a great reflection on resolutions here http://donmilleris.com/2010/01/01/living-a-good-story-an-alternative-to-new-years-resolutions/ ).

Anyway, there's something powerful and deeply necessary about resetting. The passage I read this morning used the verb "rid", cleaning ourselves of all that makes us less of the person we want to be. It uses the metaphor of newborn babies and how they crave their mother's milk, a experience I witnessed over the last year as my wife and son shared an intimate bond of growth and development. The author of 1Peter encourages people to grow up in their knowledge of and action for God, trusting that at some point they've caught a glimpse as to how they're supposed to or want to live, and the only way that it can truly happen is by resetting.

What if the ball would drop, could drop, everyday?