Something New Inside Me
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” Isaiah 43:18-19a
When I got pregnant the first time, I was hyper-aware of every movement in my belly. After a tough season of infertility, this felt like paradise. When my son was finally born and I cradled him in my arms, I knew in my innermost being: This, Lord—this is what you’ve intended! Now I see!
I can look back at times in my life, times I now know were important, and wonder how I failed to see God’s master plan. Hindsight often makes everything so clear.
Sometimes I read the Old Testament with a skewed perspective. See, I know the end of the story—I know the Israelites did indeed make it to the Promised Land. I know Jerusalem fell and its people were carted off to Babylon. I know God’s son was born in the depths of poverty, was arrested and crucified, and then resurrected.
So I scoff, “Why did those stubborn Israelites not just trust God would provide them with food? Why didn’t they understand Jesus’s miracles were not just amazing blessings but the work of the true Messiah, come to show them the path to eternity? How could they have been so blind?”
Yet we, too, are that blind—every day. We fail to see the full picture, and doubts creep in. We don’t understand, and so instead of trusting and relaxing in God’s love, we go to great lengths to orchestrate what we think will fix the problem.
It can be difficult to accept and delight in the changes God is working in our lives without an understanding of the bigger picture. But we can learn from our past, and we can trust God’s heart and the work of the Holy Spirit within us.
Forget the former things, because our God is about to do something new! Or more accurately, He is making me new!
Jessica Brodie is an award-winning journalist and a member of the Wholly Loved Ministry team. She’s also an author who currently serves as the editor of the South Carolina United Methodist Advocate, the oldest newspaper in Methodism. She is the author of More Like Jesus: A Devotional Journey (2018) and editor of Stories of Racial Awakening: Narratives on Changed Hearts and Lives of South Carolina United Methodists (2018), both from her newspaper’s Advocate Press. She also writes contemporary women’s fiction, represented by Bob Hostetler of The Steve Laube Agency. Her novel The Memory Garden won the American Christian Fiction Writers’ 2018 Genesis Contest. She has a faith blog at JessicaBrodie.com.
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Originally published Monday, 26 August 2024.
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