January. Post-holiday collapse. Which is when I’m most likely to sit down and actually think about something beyond logistics and Christmas decorations.
I was thinking about New Year’s resolutions, and you know what? They’re mostly about becoming someone different. Better. Less flawed. We want to be the version of ourselves we’d actually be okay with. And there’s something true in that. God does call us to transformation. But we’ve got it backwards somehow.
We think transformation means becoming someone else. Becoming someone who wouldn’t struggle with the same stuff. Someone who’d already have it figured out. But Scripture keeps pointing to something different. It’s not about becoming a different person. It’s about following Jesus more truly in the body you’re actually in.
That sounds smaller than we want. But I think it’s bigger. Because it means you don’t have to escape yourself to be redeemed. You just have to start saying yes to God in the middle of who you actually are. With your actual failures and your actual patterns and your actual mess.
That’s the good news nobody wants to hear on January 7th. You don’t get to start over. You get to start here. True. And somehow that’s actually more hope than the fantasy version we keep reaching for.
A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope