The #1 Thing to do When Your Life Demands a Fresh Start

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Life has a way of making us start over. I don’t know about you, but I hate starting over. Maybe you’ve had to…

Pour cereal and milk (with maybe a few tears) for breakfast after you dropped the whole pan of muffins on the floor…or

Get into the swing of breastfeeding your new baby again after you were certain you were done in that department…or

Somehow forge a fresh start in relationships after infidelity, divorce, or death (something you NEVER dreamed you’d face)…or

Start over at a new job, especially one you never thought you’d have [or have to have]…or

Transfer to a new town, state, or country because that’s where the Lord led you.

 Starting Over With New Mercies

What I so often forget is that starting over is an opportunity for a fresh start.

Starting over.  Every morning.

We are promised,

…for His [the LORD’s] mercies never end. They are new every morning…. ~ Lamentations 3:22-23.

I’m so thankful for those new mercies that we are promised each day, but some new, fresh starts are not fun. Or easy.

I know because I am there with you.  I’ve had those scary starts.  Leaving the good–or even the great–behind to begin again, hurts.  Truthfully, the inconvenience of it all can get me in a tizzy.  While sometimes starting over is exciting, sometimes your stomach is all in knots. And more often than not, you wish it was just over already.

Are you ready for the #1 thing to do when your life demands a fresh start?

Pray.  That’s not exactly what you wanted to hear, is it?  Sometimes we feel like we pray, yet nothing happens.  And while that may be true to some extent because we see no obvious change in our fresh start, there is something that happens.  When we pray over a situation or a person, our attitude, our perspective begins to change.  Our focus begins to shift, and we see things less selfishly and more heavenly.

When we pray over our fresh starts, our new beginnings, we begin to seek God’s will over our own, and the steps slowly get easier.  Before we know it we are well past the “fresh start” and right smack dab into the middle of a new normal.

The second thing to do…

There’s one more thing that I’ve discovered that really is a must for us to have joy in our do-overs that I felt compelled to share.

Embrace.

We can’t embrace without first praying for sure. However, the truth is that we can’t have joy in any.thing if we are kicking and screaming the whole way. It’s kind of like that old saying, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” There are many times that our fresh starts are not of our own doing, or while sometimes they technically are, we pursue them because we felt a call on our lives. It’s in those cases (both the ones not of our own doing and when we felt called to do a thing) that it’s best to pray for help in acceptance and help to have joy in that thing.

A fresh start for me

My kids wake up in a mood sometimes.  If I’m honest, so do I.  A mom friend told me once that she made everyone go back to bed for an hour and start the day over.  A do-over she called it.  [Could someone send me back to bed in the morning for a do-over, please?]

That’s what this is… A do-over.  A new day. A fresh start.  A new beginning.  New mercy.

As Anne Shirley said, “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” — L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.

I want to start fresh, start again, so here I am…BrinaLynn, starting fresh here to encourage you and me as we find ourselves in the trenches of motherhood and wife-hood and life.  Honestly, this is a scary new start for me.  I’m afraid of failing, of letting people (and myself) down.  But I feel very strongly that the Lord has me in this season for a reason.

So join me.  Let us find joy in these trenches…even in the fresh starts, the do-overs, the new beginnings. There will be days we all want to give up, perhaps even lots of days. As wives and moms, that’s not an option. So, on those days, may we lift one another up, and seek the Lord for peace and the ability to embrace our fresh starts.