NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS TESTIFY TO FAITH
It is a sign of health that we keep making new resolutions, despite a history of failure. In striving to renew ourselves in the face of our own falling we are making an important act of faith.
In making new resolutions we are saying: “I believe in a God who continues to love me, even when I can’t live up to it.” Every time I pick myself off the floor after a fall and begin again with some hope in my heart looking for a new start, I am saying the creed in a way that is considerably more radical, in terms of expressing actual belief in God, than is my too-easy Sunday recital of it. To make a new resolution is to believe in God.
But to make new resolutions is to express faith in the God of the resurrection. To try for new life, for a fresh start, precisely when bad habit has kept me so long in a certain helplessness, is to say: “I believe in the resurrection and the life!”
Martin Luther once put it this way: “Just as God in the beginning of creation made the world out of nothing, so his manner of working continues unchanged.” For anything to really change, including our capacity to live beyond our own wounds and selfishness, God still had to defy the impossible.
That is where faith and the resurrection enter in. As the angel Gabriel tells Mary: “For with God nothing is impossible.” Somewhere, deep inside of us, in that place where we want to make New Year’s resolutions, we still carry that faith. In that place we still say the creed and still believe in the resurrection.
Because of that belief, because of new year’s resolutions, God can still make something out of nothing!
Happy New Year and many blessings in 2021
To read more click here or copy this address into your browser
http://ronrolheiser.com/new-
www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser
No comments:
Post a Comment