What is it in us that wants beginnings and endings to be tidy, that tries to make them so?
- Finish one calendar page. Turn to the next.
- Ring out an old year. Ring in the new.
- Complete one project. Start another.
In books, the story begins on page 1 and concludes with the last period. By the time we turn that final page, we expect all the loose ends to be neatly tied. We want movies and TV shows to do the same thing in even shorter order.
Similarly, school semesters have a first day and a final day. Between those two bookends, a semester may be frightfully demanding and complicated. But at the appointed time, it’s over. Finis. Last semester’s teacher doesn’t keep giving you assignments or expect you to continue showing up for class.
Ah, but life itself can’t be contained that way, no matter how reality shows try to package it. In life, beginnings and endings rarely happen tidily. In fact, they’re usually quite messy, and may even overlap.
At times when we may desperately want life to operate in semesters or chapters or other tidy segments – at times when we feel frustrated and discouraged because it does not – it may help to remember:
Life is lived in seasons.
On our calendars, of course, the seasons appear tidy too. Each one begins and ends on a certain day. Yet in reality, the transition from fall to winter or winter to spring is far more protracted and far less predictable than the calendar indicates. In reality, the transitions in life’s seasons can be protracted and unpredictable too.
Yes, each person operates between the bookends of birth and death. But death is not the tidy ending people sometimes imagine.
And life is well underway during the months between conception and birth. In the protected environment of the womb, the little one to be born is formed, receives nurture and grows. Meanwhile, the entire expectant family operates in that protracted and unpredictable overlap of seasons.
To use a phrase borrowed from a class I took, pregnancy is an “already but not yet” time, when one season is ending while another is being ushered in.
The challenge in any time of seasonal shift is not to let the messiness keep you from ending what needs to be ended and starting what needs to be begun.
A whole nation with a leader named Moses learned that lesson the hard way. The people had lived all their lives in bondage in Egypt when God miraculously brought them out, and promised to bring them in to a good and fruitful land.
On the way, they camped at Mount Sinai, also called Mount Horeb, for a year’s worth of God-led instructions and preparations. Then, according to Moses’ account in Deuteronomy:
The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying,
“You have stayed long enough at this mountain.
Turn and set out on your journey, and go …”
(1:6-7 NAS)
Well, off they went. But almost immediately, things got messy.
When their new beginning didn’t prove tidy at all, the people bailed on Moses. Or, actually, they bailed on God. For the next 39 years, they remained stuck – purposeless, powerless, pitiful – until God finally said, to Moses and the now-grown children who had left Egypt with their moms and dads,
You have circled this mountain long enough.
(Deut. 2:2 NAS)
Centuries before the Exodus, a couple named Abram and Sarai faced their own challenges of ending one season and starting another. It all started when the Lord said to Abram,
Go from your country, your people and your father’s household
to the land I will show you.
Imagine it! Imagine being Abram the day he heard God say, Leave the people and place you did not think you would ever leave – to go with me, without knowing where.
In the same breath, God also gave Abram amazing promises. He began,
I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
(Gen 12:1-2)
A stunning call. Stunning promises. And a stunning response. Genesis 12:4 says,
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.
But nothing about a new beginning like that is tidy – not mentally, not emotionally, not physically.
At times, Abram and Sarai made it way more messy. For one thing, God told Abram to leave his “people.” Yet Abram decided to take one of them with him, his nephew Lot. That decision brought huge grief to Abram, and Lot, and both their households.
Then, after Abram and Sarai went where God led, they waited and hoped, for what must have seemed like an eternity, and still didn’t see any hint that the promises God had made would come true. How could Abram ever be the father of a nation? They did not even have a child.
So Sarai suggested, and Abram agreed, to violate Sarai’s slave Hagar, and to use her body to produce Abram a son. That one attempt to do for God what he didn’t seem able to do himself has created untold grief down through history, even to today.
God met with Hagar twice, to forewarn her of the hardships to come, and to let her know he saw her and would be with her and her son Ishmael. Also, God promised that he would bless both Hagar and Sarai and the descendants of both their sons.1
More years passed. Then, when Abram was 99; and Sarai, 90; and it seemed to both of them far too late to talk about any “new season” in their lives, God came to Abram twice. The second time, the Lord visited Sarai too.
He gave Abram and Sarai more promises, bigger than before. He changed their names to Abraham and Sarah. He declared: The two of you will have a son. And twice, the Lord told them when the birth would occur.
I will surely return to you about this time next year,
and Sarah your wife will have a son.2
What did Sarah do? She laughed. And then, she denied that she laughed.
What did Abraham do? Did you know? He laughed too. In fact, he laughed first. And then, the father of the faithful created the father of all messes.
Many times, in many ways, Abraham demonstrated profound faith in God. Yet at this key moment, he demonstrated the opposite of faith and love.3
At the very time he and Sarah were supposed to be making a baby, he suddenly moved his household to a different region.
And there Abraham said of his wife Sarah,
“She is my sister.”
Then Abimelek king of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.
(Gen. 20:2-3)
After all that waiting, all that hoping and sometimes despairing, Abraham created a situation that could have prevented him from fathering their miracle baby at the time God had set for Sarah to conceive. And if Sarah had conceived their baby before or after Abimelek “took her,” it could have been impossible to verify that the father was Abraham.
Sabotaging the birth of his promised son, Abraham would also have sabotaged all the other promises God had given him, including the Messianic promise that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12: 3).
BUT GOD intervened. The interesting thing is: He went to Abimelek, not Abraham.
The Lord said to that previously non-God-fearing king (my paraphrase), “I know you’re the innocent one here. I have kept you from touching Sarah because she is actually Abraham’s wife. But if you do not send her home, NOW, the consequences will be dire.”
Immediately, Abimelech sent Sarah back. He also confronted Abraham. Yet even when Abraham was caught lying, and exploiting and endangering his wife and their future and everything else that mattered – he did not own his incredibly wrong choices, but instead tried to rationalize and minimize them.
God saw all that. And it’s important that we see what Genesis 21:1-2 says immediately afterward:
Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.
Any year, any date, may promise you a change of season, and then also seem to withhold it.
When beginnings and endings get messy, and you find yourself hurting, in an “already but not yet” place:
Remember the Israelites, who followed the Lord out from slavery, into the wilderness. And then balked on God out of unbelief and fear. Remember them circling Mount Horeb. And circling. And circling.
Remember Abram and Sarai, who followed God out from what had always been home, into the unknown. And then waited for years for the next new season the Lord had promised them. Remember their frustration and discouragement. Remember their faith faltering and, at times, seeming to crash and burn.
Remember the Lord their God, who was gracious to Sarah and Abraham and Hagar, and to Moses and the children who came out of Egypt – the God who never left them and who did for them everything he had said.
Remember,
As messy and hard as beginnings can be, yet also: When the Lord sends you into a new season, he himself goes with you, and so do his good promises.
No matter how frightening or disappointing or impossible the changes may seem, don’t keep circling whatever mountain the Lord is telling you to leave. Don’t abort the new thing he wants to birth.
Instead, dear one: When your Lord calls, turn and set out on your journey, and go … with HIM, who is holy and forgiving, gracious and true.
Understand that it takes much time and effort to navigate a messy new year. And press on.
When you’re the one who has made a mess, own it.
He will do what he has promised you. And he will make a way where there is none, for you to end what needs to be ended and to start what needs to be begun.
The original version of this post was published December 20, 2012. It was a reprint of Snapshot 103 in my book, Focused Living in a Frazzled World: 105 Snapshots of Life, published in 2005. I’ve learned so much in the meantime that, now, I’ve renovated “Messy New Year” completely.
Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay
