Searching for new and old in God

It's a new year -- a day when we realize, remember and celebrate that a whole year has passed, and now we get more days. Thank you, God.

Amid the hope for the future and gratitude for the past, time remains a mystery, one that amazes and frustrates me, leaves me powerless and has something deep to teach me.

I can't decide if I want new or old. All around me everything is new, when all I'm asking is for someone to say old, and in the old, all I'm wanting is new. St. Augustine called God, "Beauty so ancient, so new." I am yearning simultaneously to hear in a new way, and to know ancient truths. Make yourself new to me in the old and old to me in the new, God. I am two hands holding a rubber band taut. I am two ends of the same thread.

I love the line in his song "These are the Days," when Zach Winters sings, "Hidden in time there is a constant, if we can only enter in."

It reminds me of the comfort in the seasons, their constant forward and circular motion in time. Like God, who never changes and is constantly new, living, breathing.

I wonder sometimes whether there ever will be a moment when it feels as if I've arrived, whether that moment will last and whether I'd want it to.

I've had moments of arrival, but they are fleeting, a glimpse of God and how things might one day be. I still feel as if I'm working toward something and don't know if that's because I'm young or because that's the way life is.

Trains don't just stay, though; they depart, too. Maybe life is arrivals and departures and all the space in between, all the time in God.

Thomas Merton wrote it this way: "Wrestling quietly with the circumstances of my life. There is an attitude to be taken, there are decisions to be made. There is a radical refusal demanded of me somewhere and I do not know where it begins and ends and how to approach it.

"God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when he intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that he alone can satisfy and awakens capacities that he means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and mystical generation."

In the annotation to the lyric mentioned earlier, Zach Winters directs the listener to Jesus' words in John 15:1-17: "He breaks off every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and he prunes every branch that does bear fruit. ... You cannot bear fruit unless you remain in me. ... I love you just as the father loves me; remain in My love. ... You did not choose me; I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures. ... This, then, is what I command you: love one another."

I'm wanting the new and I'm wanting the old; what I'm wanting is God. It is him and his love and this hope and assurance that we already have that remain.