A New Hope

Happy New year!  It’s a brand new year.  Everywhere people are making resolutions, setting goals, determining that this year is going to be different, better. I can’t help feeling that there are just as many people out there asking the question, “But what if it isn’t?”  What if different isn’t always better, but just different?  What if different would be nice, but it seems like we are stuck with the same?  What if a change in the calendar really can’t change the hand we’ve been dealt?  What if different ends up being worse?  There is often a tug-of-war in our hearts and minds.  We are creatures of hope; we hope for a better tomorrow, a better future, better lives, better, stronger families, a better us… we know it’s what we were created for and yet… we have fears, doubts, weaknesses, and circumstances that seem to contrive to kill our hope and steal our joy.

I have to confess that as I (we) walk into this new year, there are days when hope and optimism are an act of will. They do not come naturally as they used to.  This is not the life I know.  It’s different and not an exciting kind of different, but a frustrating puzzle, hard work kind of different.  Learning a new language and trying to communicate with people who think differently than you do is hard.  Being away from friends and daily and seasonal rhythms is hard.  Trying to find my place, my calling within this calling—what I’m “here for” is frustrating at times.  The feeling of doing something worthwhile or productive is elusive.  There are days that I wish I could wake up in the world I know and find that it’s all been some strange, exciting dream.  I would find myself in a place where I know the rules, where I know how to do life, how to be a blessing, how to serve, how to learn.  I would be in a place and time where I don’t have to send my kids back across the ocean after Christmas, where my friends were just a 10 minute drive away, where my future could be what I always thought that it would.  Sometimes the grief of what I left behind and what I thought would be makes my heart feel like it might crack into a hundred tiny pieces and split open.  On those days, I’m two people: one who wants to go back and one who knows that she can’t go back and follow Jesus at the same time.  I followed that thought—waking up to find it wasn’t real—for a minute and there’s only one problem with it.  I don’t fit there anymore.  I can’t really go back.  You see, while what has been will always be a part of who I am, I now have more.  I have new experiences and new people.  There are people here who I’d really be sad if I’d never met, I’m learning things here that I couldn’t learn in comfort and familiar routine.

While pondering this, my thoughts wandered to the passage in Scripture about new wine  and the wineskins we put it in.  God is doing a new thing in my life and in yours.  He is bringing people and circumstances, places and experiences that shape us, grow us and change us.  Our hearts, minds and horizons expand as we walk with Him in the new places.  As we walk through the new, or through old circumstances that need new eyes, a new perspective, as we do this with Jesus we become more and the old way of doing things, the old life, the old attitudes, the old speech and patterns just don’t really fit.  In fact, they hurt, like squeezing your feet into shoes that are too small.

When I read that we need new wineskins for new wine, I think that’s what it means.  A new life for the new life He’s creating in us.  I’ve been told that new wine expands and breathes as it ages, that when put into old wineskins, crusty, dried out, used old forms, they will crack and split open.  The new wine will be wasted.  But in new supple wineskins the wine can breathe and expand and do it’s thing.  It can age and become better because the newer skins will move with it.

If we think of Jesus work in us as the new wine and the wineskins as the way we do life, this makes a lot of sense.  When we first come to Christ, our old way of doing life just doesn’t fit anymore.  In fact, when we insist on just pouring some Jesus into our old way of life, we find that it all falls apart.  But even as we grow in Christ after having turned from old, sinful ways, we find that God continually asks us to change our form.  This new life He pours Himself into for us isn’t rigid and fixed.  It’s meant to be flexible, to allow us to expand and breathe.   We have to choose whether to live in the new wineskins or to allow them to become just as old and crusty as the skins we abandoned when we first fell in love with Jesus.

This requires new ways of looking at the world and our circumstances, a new speech pattern, new depths of forgivness, new levels of letting go and trusting God.  In Jesus day, it meant looking at the law and it’s requirements in a new way, it meant worshipping differently, hoping for a slightly different future that the one they thought God had promised them.  But it turned out that different was definitely better and those who moved past their disappointment moved into a new, brighter hope and a new, more perfect dream.  That’s what I want for my new year, to live fully in my new supple wineskins, to walk forward into a new hope.