New Life

The other day, I was listening to an interview with, a Benedictine monk, David Steindle Rast. He was talking about anxiety – which so many of us have been feeling these days.

He said, “We have to acknowledge our anxiety, but we must not fear. (And) There is a great difference. See, anxiety… or being anxious — this word comes from a root that means ‘narrowness’ and ‘choking.’ The original anxiety is our birth anxiety. We all come into this world through this very uncomfortable process of being born… It’s really a life-and-death struggle for both the mother and the child…”

He went on to say that if we let go of the fear, “…the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, a completely new life.”

I was listening to this and it made me think about some of my friends who lost their family business during the last big recession in 2008. It had been in their family for years. They had two kids still in high school at that time, and the loss was just devastating. They were worried about losing their house – how they were going to make ends meet. Talk about anxiety!

But God did move in their lives during that time. God did bring about something new. My buddy tells me that this whole experience brought them together as a family – bonded in ways they never could have imagined. They began to experience a whole new level of gratitude for the gifts they did have. It wasn’t too long after that, that my friend enrolled in seminary. I went to his ordination service two years ago, and today he’s a serving a Presbyterian church in Jacksonville.

If we think about it, we’ve all seen times when pain and suffering, confusion, and anxiety give way to new life.

All of this makes me wonder about all that we are going through right now…in our world, in our church… Are these birth pangs?… I don’t believe that God brought this on, but could it be that through this, God is at work even now to bring about something new?

Let us pray: Gracious God, today I pray that you would help us to let go of fear and instead to look for the potential. May we trust that you are at work – even now – even through all of this, to make all things new. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.