We long for renewal, a posture that marks the rhythms of every single person. With the promises of new starts, the longing for change and the self-help movement that plagues our screens.
We all want to begin again.
Yet we loop.
We swing around the same habits, face the same dilemma, and sit at the end of the day asking, “How did this happen again?”
Psalm 51 is a stream-of-consciousness poem, a guttural cry of desperation from the same place we each cry from. David—albeit a King, a man of much responsibility and leadership, sat and penned a song of lament, asking God to remove the shame hindering his heart from moving forward.
Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean,
scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.
Tune me in to foot-tapping songs,
set these once-broken bones to dancing.
Don’t look too close for blemishes,
give me a clean bill of health.
God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.
Don’t throw me out with the trash,
or fail to breathe holiness in me.
Bring me back from gray exile,
put a fresh wind in my sails!
Give me a job teaching rebels your ways
so the lost can find their way home.
Commute my death sentence, God, my salvation God,
and I’ll sing anthems to your life-giving ways.
Unbutton my lips, dear God;
I’ll let loose with your praise.
Psalm 51: 7-15 (the message)
If we were to take a little moment now for a reset, what would you like freedom from?
Can you write it down on a piece of paper?
Could you take a moment to free conscience write out all the parts of the recurring story that plague you.
Over the last month, I have been writing Psalm 51 with a heart-wrenching cry about the state of the church collectively. It has been a season of much change, transition and pain. Society has been searching for a plumbline amid economic crises, war, food insecurity, a pandemic and the difficulty experienced as our lives increasingly become marked by an online world.
What if we all experienced a Genesis Week: a fresh start?
Today, I want to bring us back to the beginning. The very beginning of creation and find a marker in the prose of the beginning of the world. Genesis.
God, make a fresh start in me, shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.
Psalm 51
In the beginning, the very start of it all, there was darkness—an empty void, a place of nothingness that has been debated across the markers of time. As I reflect on this place of darkness, I am reminded that God created something, through light, that began the creation process for the beginnings of it all.
In these verses we are told that God commanded and light appeared. This was God’s first creative act. That is, the light came into existence when God commanded that it start to exist. The root Hebrew word for “light” in verse 3 is or and it means ” to be or become light, shine, to be bright or to illumine.” A survey of how this Hebrew word is used in different passages of the Old Testament reveals that the word is used sometimes to refer to God’s Shekinah glory. His presence. A healing glow that transforms darkness through love. The same God who spoke and light bounced through the atmosphere is the person who sits present in our darkest moments and brings light that transforms us once again.
At the beginning of this year, I sat and worked through a process of journaling questions. Gentle Rhythms came from a place where I knew we needed to emerge from a season of profound societal change slowly and softly.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness— only light.
During that day retreat, I started to use creative processing tools to leave behind the season passing better day; I drew a picture of myself as the creative retreat asked. I did not overthink it, I let the scribbles fall out easily on the page, as the subconscious self (our prophetic nature) is always speaking, it is whether we are able to slow down enough to let it express with clarity.
The drawing was so simple yet stark!
It was a woman, overweight, tired, exhausted, carrying many things under her arms, with mountains in the background and children in the foreground. A friend asked whether I had done that part of the process yet and I shared my vulnerable drawing with her and she said “That looks very heavy and exhausting!”
I have spent the last few years trying to do it in my own strength. The heaviness was pervading every part of my being. The darkness of grief, the complexity of change and the heartache of the season had burdened me deeply. It was in that simple moment a word whispered to me, that set the framework of my year. One simple word that I keep coming back to, as we step towards the middle of the year again.
Lighter
Can I carry it all lighter?
Can light transform the darkness that I carried inside?
Can God bring a genesis week from the chaos?
Genesis 1: 3-5
Day 1. God spoke: Light! And light appeared. (3-5)
I believe that the light that God promises in our darkest periods, will bring the transformation that we truly desire.
What needs to come out of darkness?
Today is an opportunity to bring what has been hidden, into a place of transparency. It could be starting a conversation that you have been avoiding. Maybe you could write a list of things that feel heavy and give them to God for transformation.
Let’s pray together …
God, I pray for anyone reading these words now and I ask for healing from the power of your Light. Bring your transformation power into the moments that we need your help. God, bring courage to have hard conversations. Bring hope where there is despair. Bring laughter from the broken places.
Amen
