I went running this morning. A pale moon was still overhead and towering pines around me leaned over my path, looming ominously out of a thick mist. Not even the birds were singing yet. “Lord I’m sorry.” I sidestepped a fire hydrant, “I feel… rotten about this weekend.” I run and pray. This isn’t a substitute for my alone time, but being alone, in the pristine stillness of the early morning, my mind’s voice lifts to my maker. It wasn’t that I’d done anything especially wrong, I just don’t don’t know that I really did anything right, and unlike the pure perfect morning unsoiled by the bustle and clutter that churns in the wake of our ‘civilized-ness, I was dragging a fair amount of baggage along with me from my actions and decisions of the week before; and felling really… well …rotten. “I am the resurrection and the life!” God silently opens the door to my mind and steps in. “Do you know what that means?” It means a lot of things, but I know exactly what he is telling me now, because our discourse is not really a conversation; when he opens the door, I see the whole picture and no further explanation is necessary. We have a very unique gift – mornings. It begins the night before when we are forced to stop – and sleep. In the morning we have to start again. Each day is a new beginning, another chance to do it right, an opportunity for a clean break. “Yea but I still pay for the decisions of yesterday,” I say, and can almost see his half smile as he replies, “and I still had the nail holes, cuts, and gashes when I rose again too. Don’t think I didn’t limp a little walking out of that tomb. ” A fresh start doesn’t mean that we don’t carry our actions from yesterday along with us – those and the actions of others that have affected us. It means we have another chance to right those wrongs, another chance to walk that ‘other’ path whose leaves are not yet trodden black; another chance to alter the course of our lives and the lives around us for the better, to be different and make a difference.
It’s almost as is if I can feel God reach in and touch my soul. “I am the resurrection and the life! ” Suddenly I am clean inside, pristine as the morning from the door of my heart to the depths of my soul. I skip a step and laugh. I truly believe that until you take the first you will never really experience the second.