It is that time of year again, when our kids are fortunate to get to go back to school. You can’t miss it. The stores have set up huge displays of school supplies: pushpins and pencils, post-it notes and pens. Our college students have packed up all of their “most essential” items and are now lugging them up flights of stairs into their dorm rooms and student housing. Everywhere you go, you can find people shopping for new shoes and new backpacks. There is a tangible sense of excitement and anxiety as people do their best to get ready and to prepare themselves and their children for the new school year.
I always loved going back to school. For me, I most looked forward to getting a new box of crayons. It was something of a holy moment to open my new 64 Crayola crayon box for the very first time each year. I still remember the pungent waxy new crayon smell, and I always took some time to admire all of those colors, taking them out one by one to read their lovely and descriptive names. I appreciated the symmetry of the new crayons, all perfectly sharpened; every single one completely untouched, all standing up so neatly in their rows. –Every single crayon ready to facilitate and bring to life whatever big bold project I could dream up! There was also something about holding a new notebook, with its blank pages all clean and smooth that just thrilled my soul. Perhaps it was the unlimited potential of it all. The fresh opportunities to learn new thoughts and to discover new insights, the vista of potential possibilities that was now wide open on the blank pages before me that always brought my enthusiastic anticipation for a new school year.
But unfortunately, as adults, most of us no longer regularly get the thrill of anticipating the unlimited potentialities of a new school year. (Teachers and school staff being the exception.) For most of us, our lives are commandeered by the unrelenting schedule of our workplaces. Unless we land a new job or get a promotion, there is no reset and no annual chance for a new start. For most of the workforce, a week at the end of August is often much like a week in March, May or January. Every week is typically more of the same, and our deadlines and our productivity numbers mark the months and years that steadily drive back and forth to bring us more grey hairs and grandchildren.
But the good news for all of us is that our God always offers a new start. Today, our God offers to us the chance to start over, to open the day up like a brand-new notebook and to choose to live a life dedicated to loving God, others and ourselves. Our old broken lives can be in the past, left behind us like a particularly difficult school year. And while our mistakes and bad decisions are always documented in the yearbooks of our lives, and while they often require apologies, forgiveness and reconciliation, our past performance does not need to mar the potential of what you and I can do for God and for others with the new year ahead of us.
Because our God has the ability to take our scuffed up, dull, and broken crayon lives and to melt them and mold them into something brand new. It doesn’t matter if the outside wrappers of our bodies are torn and tired. With the power of God’s love, our hearts can be made new. Our old names can be retired forever, and God will give us all new spectacular names like Jazzberry Jam or Timberwolf. May we all open our lives to our loving creators desire to turn us all into new creations, just as wonderful as a new box of crayons.
Article for Rockford Squire Newspaper 8/17/2023
