Keep your resolutions alive in 2019!
Let your New Life resolution for 2018 include doing something meaningful with your life. At PEACE, we can help!
Making New Year resolutions is a way for us to imagine a new and better life. Eat right. Get fit. Do better. Do something special. This year. This time.
Yet life grinds on in its ordinariness. We go back to work, back to school, back to the routine. Pretty soon, our resolutions fade to a painful memory.
Wouldn’t you like your New Year to be the start of a new life? For real?
At PEACE Lutheran Church, we can help you:
Meet good people who will support me in my New Life.
Do something with my life that makes a difference in the world.
Get into something that’s real & lasting.
God loves ordinary
The best way to keep your resolutions is, first, know that God loves you. Yes, you, just the way you are: A little broken. A little lost. Starting to realize that life is harder than what I thought it would be.
Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” – John 10:10
New Year comes right after Christmas, and that gives us a clue to living our New Life: Christmas is about, in many ways, how God works through the ordinary to achieve the extra-ordinary. You can even think of your New Life as living Christmas all year round. That’s because Jesus’ birth is the core of what we celebrated at Christmas and shapes God’s message all year long.
So here’s the Big Theme of Jesus’ birth: God’s love poured out amid ordinariness.
Jesus came to Earth in the humblest circumstances. Scandal and rejection surrounded his parents, and the family began in homelessness. He was born in a stable – according to tradition, one built into a cave. As a toddler, Jesus escaped slaughter, and his family spent several years as political refugees in a foreign country.
When they returned home – to a backwater of the Roman Empire – their town provided labor for the cruel occupiers, who had set up a regional administrative center nearby. They were working people — his dad a carpenter, his mom a housewife. Young Jesus showed signs of being a theological prodigy, but instead of blossing into a religious big shot, he became an itinerant preacher, working wonders in crummy little towns in the backwater’s backwater.
New Life starts today – every day
What can it mean for the God of Creation to appear in such ordinary form? Yet, that’s how God worked out his plan to bring all people – including you – back into right relation with Him, with other people and with God’s good creation. Back to the way things were supposed to be.
What if God appeared to you in the routine ordinariness of your day? All of a sudden, the ordinary moments of our lives become possibilities for God – working in us and through us, for us and for the whole world. That, indeed, leads us to New Life!
At PEACE, we invite you to start your New Life with us. We’re working on New Lives, too! (And, by the way, did you know that it’s still Christmas??)