New Every Morning

Last year was a wash, really. Only I didn’t become conscious of  it until one week into 2011.

Seriously.

I almost coasted through the holiday season illness free. [Unlike last year when I spent over two months with one infection or another.] But then it happened. The day after Christmas I felt it – a  tightness in my chest, an inability to breathe deeply; within days I was antibiotics for walking pneumonia.  And we were out of town. Ugh.

As it goes, the {bed}rest required for recovery gave me ample time to read, ponder and pray… Only that light bulb didn’t go off in my head until I was almost well again. Right about the same time I had an epiphany about my year.  I blew it.

True Story.

When the light bulb turned on in my head as the epiphany was still ping-ponging back and forth between my ears, I picked up my devotional that evening and it started with Lamentations 3:19-23.

I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; how great is Your faithfulness.

The original translation I read is from “The Message”. It reads, “I remember it all—oh, how well I remember— the feeling of hitting the bottom. But there's one other thing I remember, and remembering, I keep a grip on hope”. The words hit me. I read them and reread them; and the impact of the words rushed over me like an open floodgate. Hitting bottom. Not like an alcoholic or drug addict would; but rather, over the previous months I had slowly, quietly shut down and/or sabotaged a parts of my life over and over again.  Ouch.

I knew 2010 would be a challenging year yet I started out in a sprint forward with hope and perseverance. But I soon lost speed with disappoint, bad news, loss of friends & loved ones and… FEAR. I took my eyes off the prize, I disqualified myself from the race, so to speak, and I didn’t even consciously realize I was doing it. It is very humbling to wake up and count the {really stupid choices and} mistakes you make (mistakes so easily avoided) and to admit that somewhere along the way you walked right off the path and kept on trudging along – the hard way. I’m not going to expound on the details of my journey through 2010 or the events that propelled me forward, some were posted here through the pages; but this year I believe I had more blog drafts than I had published posts. Another clue to a year thrown out of alignment.

It was no mistake you know…  getting sick with the one illness that makes me STOP.

Literally – Stop.

Obviously, that’s what I needed to see I wasn’t on the path I wanted to be. To see that I wasn’t fully trusting my Father in Heaven enough. To see that I was living through the fear of “what could or couldn’t  be” rather then living in the faith of  “what IS”.

My affliction and my wandering…yet the passage continues –

Because of the LORD’s great love
we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning.
 

NEW Every Morning.

Not once a year. But – Every. Morning.
No regrets.


Here's to a new morning.