New Beginnings

Everyone jokes about New Year's resolutions...the diet where instead of losing pounds you lose days, the cigarettes you'll stop smoking after just this last one, or the chocolate you're going to stop eating until...wait, can someone really survive without chocolate?! :)

I think people have this idea of fresh starts, where they can start something feeling good about themselves and for just a moment, feel like they're ahead in a life where it's all too easy to feel like the score racks up points against a person. It's good to have the score go back to zero and say for just a moment, "I'm gonna reach 1 point and take the lead!" The lead may only be kept for a second, but we at least give it a try. :)

Tuesday is the start of the new school semester here, and we've been trying--ok, I've been obsessing maybe--about having a good start. I'm not a procrastinator, and so I was working on lesson plans approximately a week ago. Yesterday I invited/forced the girls I work with to sit down together for a beginning of the semester meeting, and today I strongly encouraged them to clean the office/arrange desks/etc....all in an attempt to start the semester off right.

This evening, as we gave up on the rest of our office cleaning, we decided to grab dinner individually and then come together to watch Star Wars as kind of a last hurrah before the real work starts, but a trip to the nearest Tsutaya revealed--alas!--Star Wars was nowhere to be found available... And even though I KNOW that it's actually wiser for us to be apart for awhile and we all needed a break, we settled on another choice and came home to watch it...but instead of being a little action and romance tied together, the movie ended up involving really ugly lessons/messages/religion based on fear and curses, and at the end of the night all of us looked at each other with a mixture of regret saying, "Sorry I suggested that...sorry I made you guys go with that...sorry I didn't stop you..."

One of my first thoughts was, "Man...what a way to start the semester." But as I've been thinking over that for the last hour or so, I've realized something...our "score," as human beings, is never 1 to 0, with me in the lead. Life is full of sin, and we are sinful, and sometimes we need to stare truth in the face: alone, we lose. No amount of right actions that hide awful motives or good motives that are behind pathetic actions can put me in a position of a "good start."

I got a phone call tonight from one of my friends in Tokyo, who'd visited a church this Sunday where the whole sermon wasn't about Jesus...it was about being a better, happier Christian. He was with one of my other friends, and both of them reported how disgusted and sad they felt when they heard the preaching to be better people and smile more often and get closer to God so that He could love them. My friend summed it up by saying, "It was very lonely." That's maybe what happens when we try to kick God out of the picture and make our own "good starts"...it gets lonely, and pretty soon simply hopeless. No wonder why so many religions are based off of fear, violence, and ugly ugly ugly things...it doesn't take a lot of learning or life experience to make us realize that on our own in life, we're screwed. So people grab for whatever they can get to harness the spiritual side of life that they can't understand or compete with...

"But we preach Christ crucified..." A God of love, willing to die for people that He loves rather than subject them to death. A God who has to have perfection, so He makes a way for people to die with His Son and also receive His Son's life...Sorry this theme is so common in my blogs...but I have to say again, thank God for grace, and for forgiveness...

I'm not saying that people should throw off all restraints, be bad stewards of what they've been given, and simply sit saying, "Poor me, unable to get ahead in life!"...not at all. And you don't have to read too far into the Bible until you hear things like, "Put to death the sinful man..." and "offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God..." Sigh. Yet sometimes it's good for people...especially me, who knows how to make myself "look good" religiously and otherwise...to have to sit down and say, "Yeah, I blew it...but it's ok."

So this semester's gonna start in the best way that I can think possible...under the protection of the Creator God, in the forgiveness coming from Jesus, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit...it's a good start, I think.