On New Beginnings

Photo by Magic Madzik

So I moved to Nashville a few months ago.

There's something curious that happens when you make a move. You kind of get this opportunity to be something different. Nobody really knows who you were before you got there.

To a lot of my Nashville friends, I'm "that writer guy" or "the guy who's writing a book." But I'm not really known like that in Knoxville. Most people in Knoxville know me by the things I did as a Young Life leader or a youth leader at Cedar Springs, my home church. Some may even know me as "that guy who almost threw up on stage during his talk at youth group," or worse. Who even knows. I've done some weird stuff.

New beginnings are interesting. When your slate gets wiped clean, you have this rare opportunity to start again. You get to recalibrate, to rediscover yourself without the baggage that comes with your old identity, the way other people saw you that somehow defined you.

I'm on a kickball team with some people in Nashville. I wear a zip up hoodie and I put my hood up for every single game. The first couple times I did it, it was because it was raining. Now I do it because I think it's funny that some people know me as "that guy with the hood." As far as they know/care, I've never taken my hood off for anything, from pool parties to beach trips to weddings. And that's funny to me.

When you first meet somebody, that's when their story starts in your world. Until you start to think about where they might have come from, their past doesn't really matter to you.

And that's kind of how new beginnings with Jesus work.

When you meet Jesus, he offers you a clean slate. It's like you get to start your story again. It's one of those moments in life where you get to take the things you were known by, and the things you knew yourself by, and throw them out the window. You get to readjust the lens you look at yourself through, which causes you to live differently and more authentically.

You get to really find out who you are, to go the way you would have been going had you not had all that extra baggage.

And the coolest part, you can do it as many times as you like.

The things I hate most about myself, and the things I'm most embarrassed of, I can bring to God and he will give me a clean slate. He will let me start anew, like I've moved cities and started a new life, without my old self hanging over me to tell me how the "real me" is supposed to act or live.

I can choose to live out of the identity my past has told me I am, the one who has been unfaithful or an inconsiderate person or a bad lover or a bad friend, but I don't have to anymore. I can live out of the freedom of a clean slate. I can live out of my original design, the identity I was made for.

Is today the day for a new start?

Psalm 103:12 - "He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west."

2 Corinthians 5:17 - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."