He Makes Us New!

Has it really only been a week since the Super Bowl? That was a sad night indeed (that's me consoling Big Ben in the picture). Oh well. Life goes on and I’ve got 6 Super Bowl trophies to cry on.

This past week has felt like forever. I finished my first unit of online Spanish, started working more as a manager at Coldstone, applied for LT for the summer, played a lot of racquetball on the weekend and got closer to a lot of my boys/girls from the Mark Twain Canvas Group (represent!). It’s been a lot of fun.

I’ve done a lot of hanging out with Mark Twain peeps this semester, mainly because God made it clear to me towards the end of last semester that I was spending far too much time focused on journalism, internships, and stuff related to my hopeful future career. The idol of success had been grabbing a hold of me and I needed to get God back in the place he deserves: First.

I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping myself around God-like people for the first month of 2011, so it’s been a really encouraging semester for me so far. My core group has been awesome this year, I’ve been going to church instead of basketball games (say whaaaaaaa?) and I have been putting more of my daily focus on Him.

All this is really good for me. It’s fun and important to hang out and fellowship with other people of faith, but the thing that needs to come from that is growth in the Lord.

I think that’s been happening in the first month I’ve been back in good ‘ol CoMo. Putting yourself in good situations with people of the Lord helps you to always think of Him and your developing relationship with Him.

A song we sung at the Rock last night (“Beautiful Things”) really got me thinking at the end of the night. Here’s part of the pretty simple song:

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

Obviously these 4 lines (the main part of the chorus) are powerful. All we have and all we have become is because of Him.

But it’s the last part of this song that got me thinking.

You make me new, You are making me new
You make me new, You are making me new

Isn’t it crazy that no matter who we are or where we are at in our walks with Christ, we are always being made new by God!? Even if we think we are in a good place with Him, He can reveal something about Himself that we had never thought of before or have neglected to think about for a while.

Some things get stale, but our relationships with God can never get stale if we do our part. God is always doing his part. He’s always trying to make us new. We’ve just gotta accept it and become what He wants us to be.

I had spent the first couple of years of college not allowing myself to be made new by God. He was presenting me with opportunities to be more like Him, but I turned away in order to find “happiness” elsewhere.

Now that I recognize it, I’m doing my best to follow the path God has for me because He knows what he’s doing, right? He’s always making us new! PTL! (i this acronym)