NEW YEAR, NEW BEGINNING. Just when I thought my circumstances in the year 2009 could not get any worse, they did. How many times? Time and again. Every time I came up for air from yet another loss or challenge, boom. More pain. More heartache. More trials and tribulations. But the Lord does not see losses and heartache as the world does. He does not view them as a finite end. Jesus Christ, the “author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2 KJV),” sees our end as His beginning. When we realize we are at the finish of what we can do as humans, the Lord has His opportunity to step in and show us what He can and will do as God. When the year 2009 finished, the year 2010 began. I look at the year past and see the ashes of pain and loss everywhere. But God can give us “beauty for ashes (Isaiah 61:3 KJV)” if we step out of His way and let Him. The same Jesus who raised Lazarus from the dead can lift us up from the ashes of our losses. The other side of an end is a beginning – the beginning of the new life the Lord desires to create. May God truly bring beauty this year from the ashes of the year past.
“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb 12:2 KJV).”