A verse I've been thinking on and praying a lot lately is Jeremiah in Lamentations 3: "Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning," -- especially the "new every morning" part.
For a while I guess I was thinking of it just being a kind and thoughtful thing for God to give us new mercies every morning. Something like when the milkman used to come and leave those glass bottle thingies on the porch. You wake up and "Why, look! New mercies! How nice." And I had also thought about it as a clean slate -- God's forgiveness allowing us to live in the gift of His mercy in a new day, even when we were failures the day before.
But tonight, while I was sitting here eating my dinner (the upshot of posting that "not hungry blah blah blah" thing was realizing in the middle of Bible study that I was, in fact, now very very hungry) and thinking about things that have happened lately, I thought of a new angle to the new mercies thing.
So often God blesses me with a particular show of His compassion -- maybe a conversation with a friend; or an event I'd planned that ended up being a display of His perfect plan, not mine; or a specific verse of Scripture or a song that exploded with meaning; or an especially beautiful morning or sunset or moonrise -- and when I think about His mercies I think (whether I admit it or not), "That was really cool when you did ______, God. I was blessed by that. Please do that again." Or, worse yet, I think of His mercy in terms of that thing: "The way God shows His mercy to me is by sending breathtaking full moons," or "The way God shows His mercy to me is by giving me a precious fellowship with ___________" -- and I put His mercifulness in a box.
And all the while He is sending new mercies. New every morning.
And I'm stuck in my rut, milking my old mercy, hoping to catch that whatever-it-was again.
And all the while He is sending new mercies. New every morning.
Not in a box, not predictable, not quite even repeatable, timely.
Perfect.
His mercies are new (fresh, novel, original, unfamiliar, unheard-of, unknown, unprecedented) every morning.
3 comments:
Thank you Emily!
Our God is so precious!
How is it that you always manage to spin these things in a metaphysical sort of way, when Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Derrida always make it sound like my previous understanding of the universe is collapsing around me?
Maybe by not reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Derrida?
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