| Recently, my cell phone froze up, black screened and permanently died. Inconvenient, yes, but I wasn’t too upset about it. For quite a while, I’d been eyeing the new and improved model with the bigger screen and wayyy better camera. And now, finally, I could justify getting it – guilt free!
Thrilled with my new purchase, I spent hours exploring it. Then it happened. A commercial aired unveiling the brand spanking new version of the now outdated phone I held in my hand. The one I had literally just bought less than a week earlier!!! Are you kidding me???
Crazy how in an instant I was no longer thrilled. I was extremely irritated.
What is it, in us humans that yearns for the new? There’s a thrill and excitement attached to it that we can’t explain. We dream. We see. We want… We’re constantly striving to get it.
Eventually though, something mysterious happens. Once we’ve actually acquired it, how is it that we so soon tire of it? No matter what it is, it inevitably loses its luster and before long, we’ll find our heart’s attention has turned, distracted by the next shiny newbie.
We not only do this with things – but often, we’ll do with our lives as well. We treasure “new” life moments – a new relationship, the fresh attractiveness of a wedding day, the bright and promising future of a college graduation or the incredible miracle of a baby being born – all symbolizing new beginnings. We try to make our self images new with changes in hairstyles, weight loss and sometimes even surgery.
But sadly, with each passing day, the new eventually wears off – and we’ll find our hearts dancing a little less and our souls sighing a little more. The overdue bills, feverish babies, dead-end jobs, and arguments between us – all smudges of our humanness – tarnish and turn the precious and new into the ordinary and mundane.
In all of life, we see the new fades so quickly. Sadly, when we reach this point, we can be tempted to clean out our relationship closets in an effort to capture and feel the evasive new against our skin once more.
Without the new, we begin to feel unsatisfied – like we’re missing something. And in some ways we are… But It doesn’t have to be this way.
Maybe what we’re really losing is our perception – the way we’re viewing our lives.
What if there’s a specific purpose and reason we instinctively are drawn to and appreciate new things?
After all, it’s this drive for the new that births innovation. Without this appreciation, we would never create – and all of us are creative beings in our own way. It’s called life and the beauty of it… the ability to create the new.
And who says we can’t create the new from the very place we feel stuck in right now? I think the challenge is not to fall for the lie that just because we’ve had something a while, that it can’t be made new every single day. And this includes our relationships, our lives, and ourselves.
The question really is, will we choose to see it this way. All it takes is a mental shift and a little effort on our part. We can ask God to open our eyes to see in a new way – to give us a new perspective. It’s then we’ll see our life bloom.
Where would you like to see new appear in your life today?
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:19
I am making everything new. Revelations 21:5 |
