A New Life

When my dad was a young man, he had a brother-in-law who owned a collection agency. They were friends though my uncle was a good deal older than my dad. One day my father ask my uncle exactly how the collection business worked. My uncle explained that some people who owed money would fail to pay it, and sometimes their creditors would turn the unpaid accounts over to a collection agency to collect the past due debt. And that was where he came in. He would try to collect some of those funds, and he made his money by getting to keep some of the money he collected. My dad, whose first name was Lollis, asked him how much of the money he got to keep, and my dad remembered his exact answer to that question many years later when he was telling me this story. My uncle looked straight at him and said, “Blooming near all of it, Lollis, blooming near all of it!”

It was only a few weeks or days after that encounter that my uncle disappeared. My Aunt Cora, his wife, never saw him again. After many years, it was assumed that he had deserted her or was dead. Their marriage was officially dissolved, and eventually she remarried and had a son. I knew him although he was a grown man who drove a moving van when I was just a child, and by that time my Aunt Cora’s second husband had died. When I was about ten or twelve years old, my aunt was notified by officials in New York that her first husband had been found dead. Apparently, for many long years he had operated something like a little pawn shop in the famous skid row district of New York City known as the Bowery. Though he apparently had never made any attempt to reconnect with anyone in his previous life, he had carried my aunt’s contact information with him all those years, and when he was found dead, she was the one they notified, and she was the one who made all his final arrangements.

The desire for a clean slate or for relief from the pressures of an overburdened life, whether those burdens are self-imposed or not, has caused many people to simply run away. Sometimes things seem so bad that some begin to prefer the unknown to the known. They crave a change, a fresh start. When my uncle ran away, it was pretty certain he was going to have a fresh start somewhere, and he chose to have it in the shadowy underground of New York City rather than in a prison.

Longings to evade the stresses of one's daily life can make a man or a woman an easy prey for an extramarital affair or for some type of addiction such as drugs or alcohol. Even an obsession with very legitimate pursuits such as collecting, body building, or an excessive interest in a particular sport can all be indications of a person’s attempt to escape his boring or threatening circumstances in order to find identity in a new life. Of course, these shallow activities do not satisfy the spiritual cravings of our soul. Only the Lord can do that.

For most of us, the desire for newness and freshness in our life can be slaked sufficiently with thoughts of vacations, holidays, or visions of retirement. Even an excursion to a mall, a movie, or a meal out is sometimes a way to bring some needed freshness into our lives, if only for a little while. We can temporarily leave our messes behind and go somewhere that is different or new and kind of “unmessy.” Sometimes getting out and seeing other people and doing something different can kind of clear our heads of all the clutter and maybe help us see things in a more positive light.

I was browsing in a office supply store once when a clerk ask if she could help me. I decided to have a little fun, and said, "Yes, actually I'm looking for something that will change my life." I could have continued by telling her that what I really wanted was what Arthur Sullivan called "The Lost Chord," the one that "links all perplexed meaning into one perfect peace." But long before I could have gotten all that out, she was gone, having decided, I suppose, that I needed far more profestional help than she could provide.

If anything in the universe is apparent, it is the fact that our loving Creator-God knew that we would often need a fresh start. We have days, weeks, months, and years, each of which offer us a clean slate of a sort. At the beginning of the year, we hear a lot about New Year’s resolutions. The New Year provides a natural partition between the past and the future, and it helps us with our need for newness in our life. Even the weekend provides a natural break between mini episodes of our life. We don’t have to wait for the New Year or even the weekend, however, because every new sunrise is, in a sense, a fresh page or a new beginning. As Lamentations 3:21-22 says, “It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

But the tour de force of newness is the new life we are given when we come to Christ. Paul said in II Corinthians 5:17 that if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: old things have passed away and all things have become new. Talk about a fresh start or a new beginning! Leaving home and family and starting over in New York doesn’t even compare to the new life we receive in Christ. This is a radical newness. Romans 6:4 says “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

In speaking of the potential of this new life, C. S. Lewis writes, “…remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” Such is the newness of life to which we are called.

Our God is the God of new lives and new things. Through the prophet Isaiah God promises to do something new for the nation Israel in Babylonian captivity:

Forget the former things;
Do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up;
Do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
and streams in the wasteland. (Isa. 43:18-19 NIV)

The provision that God makes for us is called the new covenant. In the upper room Jesus explained, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” In the Epistle to the Hebrews we are told that this new covenant involves God’s putting his laws or his thoughts into our minds so that we can be a new kind of people. (See Hebrews 10:16.) Paul urged the Ephesians to "put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." (Eph. 4:24) In the Psalms David affirms that God has put a new song in his mouth. What does that new song represent? New life.

During his earthly ministry Jesus was always giving people a new life:

In John 4, we read of Jesus telling the Samaritan woman whom he met at a well that he could give her water that would quench her deepest thirst forever. After having her eyes opened she went back to her village and told her friends, “He told me everything I ever did.” And the gospel record tells us that because of her testimony many of the Samaritans decided they wanted this new life and were converted to Christ.

In John 9, we learn of a man who was totally blind from birth being completely healed by Jesus. His healing at first was physical, but that was enough to cause this young man to know that there was something very different about this amazing Person, and it was with great boldness he stood up to those who opposed Jesus. He told these supposedly religious experts that it seemed very strange to him that they would know so little about a man who could heal a person’s eyesight who had been blind from birth. This made them very angry, and they belittled and insulted him and threw him out of the synagogue. Later Jesus returned to him and asked him if he believed on the “Son of Man,” a title he often used to emphasize his incarnate deity. The man said, “Tell me who he is so I can know him.” Jesus said, “You have seen him; it is I that speak to you.” Then this formerly blind man fell down and worshipped him.

Time and space prevent us from talking about the fresh, new start Jesus gave Nathaniel, Zacchaeus, Peter, Lazarus, and so many, many others. In fact, every person who met Jesus was given a new life if he or she wanted it. The offer was available to conceited, religious snobs like Nathaniel, rough fishermen like Peter, slick shysters like Matthew, educated, but still ignorant religious experts like Nicodemus, and rich rulers like the unnamed young man who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. We are told that Jesus, looking on him, loved him, but the rich young ruler turned away without getting in on this wonderful new life choosing, at least for the time being, to cling to his riches.

No matter how desperate or bored we might feel, may we always remember that the escape or adventure we seek cannot be found in the far country to which the prodigal son fled or to the bustling city where my uncle tried to lose himself and his past life. Our new start will not be found at a place but in a Person who makes all things new.

The Road Not Taken

Today I'm thinking about the words of Robert Frost in his penetrating poem, "The Road Not Taken." When faced with a choice between two roads, which to him at the time seemed pretty equally desirable, he chose the one less traveled. But he did not completely abandon the other maintaining that he would keep it for another day. And then the terrible reality hit him, and he responded resolutely with those powerful but somber words, "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back."

There are so many goodbyes and separations in life. There are so many ways that lead on to other ways, and there are so many, many people, extraordinary people in one way or another, who inevitably get left behind no matter how much we deplore that idea. Life is complex, and its paths are endless, but our ability to trace all of them out are finite. Thank the Lord for planes, phones, the postal service, text messages, and e-mails. But all the computers in the world could not enable us to remain in relationship with that throng of people we feel should be included in our circle.

As painful as it is to confront the doubt that there will be enough days in our life to return to this spot and explore that interesting person we left behind, we somehow have to make peace with it. It helps to remember that life has been constituted as it is by God. It is a limitation He has placed on us that will make it impossible to keep alive a relationship with every person we have ever known or even with every person who at one time or another has been important to us.

As in so many other areas of life, we must accept our limitations and strike a balance between quantity and quality. For example, if God has given us a spouse and/or children, it is more important to focus on them than it is to keep alive relationships with friends we met long ago. And even a person who has no close family ties is usually assigned, by God, to a relatively small group of friends in whose lives he can make a real difference if he concentrates his social energy on these people. The opposite of concentration is dilution. If we don't concentrate on these most important relationships which God has placed in our life, we run the risk of diluting our effectiveness with all our relationships. We are all aware and not impressed by the caricature of the salesman or politician who wants to know and be known by as many people as possible but whose relationships are mostly hollow and meaningless.

Like Frost, occasionally we may look back on some of the many roads not taken, or more appropriately here, on all the interesting and wonderful people who have drifted away. But knowing that our finiteness in these matters is a limitation God has imposed on us should prevent guilt. Most of our time should not be spent sadly and nostalgically looking backward on relationships which have been broken or interrupted for one reason or another but rather joyously walking or even skipping down the road taken. And besides, in heaven we will one day get to probe to the depths those relationships which life in this world has forced us to temporarily neglect.