The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. – Lamentations 3:22-23
Monday morning I woke up early enough to walk the dog just as the sunrise was beginning to push its way over the trees to the east. Max was more interested in rabbits and new smells, but I found it hard to keep my eyes from constantly wandering to the ever-changing colors in the sky.
It is a helpful practice, looking up. Not in the sense of losing touch with the world around us (we all know people who are, as my mother once told me, “so heavenly minded they are no earthly good…”), but looking up in order to put things in perspective, or to see things in a different light.
Another way to say this is to “shed a new light.” I like that. God’s point of view is always “a new light.” The freshness, the invention, and the constant creativity of God is the whole point of ideas like “new every morning,” and, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here” (2 Corinth 5:17)!
Faith in God, I believe, helps us in terms of “the big picture.” And a daily walk with God brings the world around us not only into clearer focus but a more expansive view.
- It is not just “me”, it is community;
- it is not just this town, this state, this country, but a whole world full with God’s children;
- it is not just Earth, we are part of an far more expansive creation;
- it is not just time, but eternity;
- not only physical, but spiritual;
- not merely mortal, but of immortality;
- not limited to what is seen, but the unseen too.
We are standing – always – at the interface of this particular moment and the uncharted scope all that is possible; like standing on the shore where the vast oceans lap against the less than substantial sands where we are standing; like watching the sun rise over the trees in the east, and knowing that our experience of light and life is brought into focus not by own own will but in response to a vast universe of possibility.
And that possibility rests in the heart and the love of God.
New every morning is the love
John Keble (1822)
Our wakening and uprising prove;
Through sleep and darkness safely brought,
Restored to life and power and thought…
It is a new day – so let’s celebrate! DEREK
