Next Loop
Once again we find ourselves on the cusp of a brand new year. We have drawn an imaginary line in the solar system, we have all traveled one complete loop around the sun together, and now we cross that line again and start our next loop.
It’s interesting to me that, in the cosmic sense, a year just means our planet has traveled in a great big circle. In the personal sense, that’s the last thing most of us want to do in a year. For the most part, we all want our lives to be moving forward. We want to be healthier than we were a year ago. We want to be wealthier than we were a year ago. We want to be smarter than we were a year ago.
It kind of feels like failure if we look back and see that we are starting this year in the same place we started the last one.
A wise man once told me that in 10 years of life a person can either learn 10 years of life lessons or they can learn one year of life lessons 10 times over.
Genius! Right?
In my life, I think I've spent years on both of those different tracks. I've had years of growth and learning in which I've been able to walk into the new year as a person who was farther ahead in life. I've also had years of stumbling and bumbling and repeating past mistakes and then straggled into the new year as a person who was at best starting over at the same place I started the year before.
I can’t speak for you, but I know which one of those experiences I like better.
For me, life is a thing that should be lived in forward progress, even if the stuff of life around us is going nowhere, or even backwards.
The trick is figuring out how to live that life. How do we keep growing forward instead of just circling around the same old stuff?
I do not pretend to be wise enough to invent the answer to that question, but I do think that I’ve discovered an important part of it.
Possibly my favorite few sentences in the whole Bible are found in the Book of Romans, Chapter 12. They answer this question of how to live life directionally by saying:
“Therefore I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be TRANSFORMED by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—His good, perfect, and pleasing will.”
I believe that in those words we find the answer of how to live our lives in a forward direction, even if the whole world is just going in circles.
The answer is to live lives of radical sacrifice. Not one more day wasted on just doing things the normal way. And that external change happens when we—moment by moment and day by day—fight the battle for our own minds by seeking out the truth of God and choosing to believe it.
If you want to make certain that you start off your next trip around the sun in a very different place than you are starting off this one, choose radical new life by giving yourself completely to God inside and out, and then live accordingly. And when you mess it up and find yourself falling into old habits, choose radical new life again right from there knowing that God loves you, and He is never going to let you go.
