When I was little, I hated endings.
I cried on the last day of Kindergarten because I wasn’t ready for it to be over.
When I finished a book series I loved, I had a hard time pushing back the sadness over not being able to go pick up the next one off the shelf.
After a sleepover, I wrote a journal entry about a movie we had watched the night before, bemoaning the fact that I would probably never see it again.
As I got a little older, I didn’t grow fonder of endings, but I came to accept them as part of life. I found Ecclesiastes 3:11b—“He has also set eternity in the human heart”—and clung to it as proof that my heart’s rebellion against endings was natural because I had been made for eternity.
I still don’t love endings, and I probably never will, but a few minutes ago, as I was thinking about the end of 2015, I remembered something that I tend to forget: With every ending comes a lovely little thing called a beginning.
I still hate turning the last page of a good book, watching the credits roll on a movie I loved, and saying goodbye to an old friend. But there’s something delicious about opening a new book cover, waiting in the dark of the theatre for a new movie to start, and going to an event to make a new friend. New . . . isn’t always the terrifying thing I make it out to be in my mind. Sometimes it’s pretty good.
That’s what I want 2016 to be: a year of new beginnings.
This is what the LORD says . . . “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:18-19
See you in the new year.
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