The Joy of Starting Over
Oct 14th, 2008 by ljkim
Anyone who’s hit “rock bottom” in some way winds up faced with the same choice: give up (continue in denial or despair) or start over anew. I don’t know why, but there’s a joy and a depth that comes with reaching that point and starting over. In the end I think anyone who gets there and gets a new life would rather choose doing that (having all the bad and good happen) over a life of unbroken success. I know many people won’t agree with that, but I’m convinced of it. Just as the ancient stories suggest: a phoenix is reborn out of its ashes. In business I think you could only get a Steve Jobs (as he is now) after he’d been fired from Apple, had a failed second company, and started Pixar. We can only have a Jimmy Carter humanitarian ambassador to the world, after a rather difficult term as president. In the early church, only a Peter who had rejected Jesus and been restored could have led the early church in Jerusalem and been humble enough to accept people like Saint Paul, and then allow himself to be publicly corrected.
So why should we ever be afraid of having been wrong and needing to start over? I think God often tries to show us that we’ve gone wrong, not to cut us down, but to lift us up. And this answers the question, “But why does He let people go wrong in the first place?” The secret to doing anything meaningful is to start over, rely on Jesus for atonement, and reconnect to God’s unlimited love and power for you. This is why the early church looked at trials and sometimes found joy.
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