itsawonderfilledlife

How will we enter this new week? Are you sliding into it? wandering? hesitant? excited? fearful? reluctant?

In the last couple of weeks I have heard many stories, from many individuals. Stories of struggles with the church, health, finances, marriages, children, loneliness, anxiety and apathy.

The weight of those stories, heavy. They are stories without easy answers that can be attained and tied up with a bow. They are stories that can leave us exhausted, immobile, frozen from fear.

But this is a new week. A fresh start. What will we take into this week? What will we bring into this day, this new week that might mar what it’s freshness has to offer?

We enter into the new with the dust of the old.

What is the dust we are carrying into this clean new week? Have our worries and our sorrows left us singing a dirge? Are we starting the week with prayers of pleading, prayers of need and desperation?

I have started too many weeks this way. I have forgotten that my every fresh start should begin, not with pleading, but praising. I need to start afresh with thanks for his sacrifice, for his incomparable love for me.

If anyone is worthy of praise and thanksgiving, it is the resurrected Christ. We need to start our week with what God has done through Jesus, in mind. We may feel like very brittle, breakable, clay jars but within us we carry the power of the Spirit of God.

Let us begin this week praising God, allowing the dust of last week to fall from us.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our (light and momentary)* troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18

light and momentary* (troubles)
This definition of our troubles is not a statement due to lack of sensitivity, but of eternal perspective. It could be referenced to statements of how short our lives are on this earth, such as you are but a vapor (James 4:14).