All Things New

Has it only been a week since that last post? It feels like a lifetime.

I've been offered two jobs since then, and if I like the work, a third. I'm having many second thoughts about leaving in the middle of the session - we just started spring, and I don't know if I want to leave in just a few weeks.

But beyond that, it's been more or less business as usual.

I finished John, and wrote the haiku

Jesus is the light 
By which we see everything 
This light is our life 

And I started Deuteronomy. It's a book about remembering everything God has done for us. It's knowing who we are and pressing in to know who He is. It's about Remembering Jesus Christ. It's about the gospel. It's about the basics -

Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, lest they depart form your heart all the days of your life. Deuteronomy 4:9

Know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. Deuteronomy 4:39 

Take to heart all the words by which I am warning you today...for it is no empty word for you, but your very life...Deuteronomy 32:46-47

In Deuteronomy, I love seeing the caution to remember what God has done for us. Forgetting our history causes us to relive it. Every law is to help us remember the Lord, and in following Him, we bring honor and glory to your name.

I reread A Hunger for God, and enjoyed a day of fasting, of hungering for Jesus, of longing for the fullness of the hope I've been promised.

"When we eat, we taste the emblem of our heavenly food - the Bread of Life. And when we fast we say, 'I Love the Reality more than the emblem' 

And of course, there's the start of John Piper's most famous quote -

"God rewards fasting because fasting expresses the cry of the heart that nothing on the earth can satisfy our souls besides God. God must reward this cry because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him"

And this morning, I woke, writing,

Feeling a lot of things, but mostly, I'm exhaling 

I read Deuteronomy for the fifth time. Inspired by 32:46-7 again, I wrote

The word is life. Jesus is the word. Jesus is life. 

Thankful that it is called today - I can turn my heart to the Lord, and He will be near. 

I went to my Friday yoga. It was the first class of spring with this instructor, and he started things off with a poem about the newness of spring, the turning over so that there can be growth. This really resonated with me, and left me soft and pensive

It's beautiful, the things that can well up in your heart during a yoga class. Today was all of spring of newness - and what did I have but - 

Behold, I am making all things new (Revelation 21:5)

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13)

...who makes known the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10)

And of course, I was singing - You're Beautiful 
When we arrive at eternity's shore 
Where death is just a memory and tears are no more
We'll enter in as the wedding bells ring 
Your bride will come together and we'll sing 
You're beautiful 

And Tina, heavy on my heart 

Last year, I prayed for Tina by running. I trekked up mountains and skipped over rocks. I prayed for chains to be broken as I communed with God in spring snow and heard branches break beneath me. And this year, I am quieter. I sit in a twisted pigeon, feeling more open than ever, and hear Him say - Behold, I am making all things new - I make known the end from the beginning - I am the beginning and the end. I contemplate how bending does not have to mean breaking, and how folding in half can actually bring length. My heart, surrounded by thorns and flesh, can't yet devour the bread the Spirit brings, and yet I taste it. I teeter ever on the edge of already and not yet. I breathe deeply and drink deeply and hope and pray that I can live deeply. Encourage deeply. Live deeply. Jesus is sweeter to me now than then - sweeter than in the right after, than in that first year. Will He grow my love for Tina yet all the more? Will my heart long for Him more fully? What will He be doing in this a year from now? In then years? My heart is full just thinking about it - all of it. Before the world was created, God knew the sorrow that would be Christina's, and He also knew the grace He'd extend. Before we were born, He knew the love we'd have for each other in the joy of His Son. And He knows how we, how all things, are being made new, being made known. He knows my heart now and only, He knows how soft it may be decades to come. I will hope in His name, that I will know it too. 

And then.

I have to laugh. My bike got a flat on the way to the chiropractor. All this reflection on the God who knows the end from the beginning. It's funny right? Because, oh yes, He knew this too. And He knows how He's using this day and this flat for my good. What a beautiful Jesus I know. 

Happy Friday. Happy spring.