Time To Hit Reset

I like to imagine that the beginning of a new year is a little like the reset button on my kid's video game console.  

With the video console if you don't like where things are headed in the game you're playing, or you reach an impasse, or you keep getting ambushed by marauding elves or a dragon... you can simply hit the reset button and start again. 

Your progress up to that point is saved, so no worries there---you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning, but you do get a fresh start if you're stuck and you need one. 

As I write this, I am all too aware of the inadequacies of my analogy, but I'm also not willing to give up on it.   You see, I do believe that life has a reset button, it's just that most of us are unwilling or unable to hit it when we need to.

The other day, I heard someone say something that has been stuck in my head ever since:  "You can start your life over any time you want." 

There's something both exhilarating and terrifying about that though, isn't there?  I know I felt it as soon as I heard it, and I haven't been able to shake it since.  It takes courage to start over, it takes a crazy amount of defiant hope to begin again.  

The moment that we fully and finally realize that we are gifted with the inexhaustible grace of God is also the moment when we can begin to love and forgive ourselves.  In fact, learning to love ourselves is probably the most Jesus-like thing that we can do sometimes. 

I recently read an amazing quote from the late Rachel Held Evans where she talked about what it meant to "love oneself well."  I think it's an appropriate share for the first Daily Devo of 2022: 

To love oneself well is to regard one's place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one's strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one's weaknesses.  

To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made... 

As you move into this new year, may you realize fully and finally just how loved you are by a God whose grace never runs out, and who has and will always be in the business of second chances... or third... or a hundred and twenty... 

You can start your life over any time you want.  You can hit that reset button and start fresh.  You can discover what it means to love yourself well, to know yourself intimately, and to live into your best and truest self from this day and every day after. 

I  know that I will be doing my best to do the same.  May it be so for all of us.  And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen. 

 

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