The land of Beginning Again

Iwish that there were some wonderful place Called the Land of Beginning Again Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches And all of our grief and sin Could be dropped like a shabby old coat by the door And never be put on again. —Louisa Fletcher

Wouldn’t we all want to go to a Land of Beginning Again? A land where worries disappear like the stars at sunrise. A world where burdens have no more weight than billowy clouds. A country where the words sin and guilt have never been spoken. A kingdom where the Lord of Grace is the only sovereign.

It seems the Lord is always shuffling people to a new land. Floating Noah and his family off to a whole new world of beginning again. Calling Abraham to begin a new life in a land he had never known. Bringing Israel to a new beginning in a land flowing with milk and honey. Leading Mary and Joseph to Egypt, and then back again for a new beginning in Nazareth.

There is this encouraging promise of God in the Book of Ezekiel: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you.” What we need is not so much a new land, but a new heart and a new spirit to live in the land that is already ours. This is a new beginning!

Robert Fulgum tells of a couple whose wedding he officiated. The land mines and complications in their lives and the lives of their families rivaled anything he had every encountered as a minister: parental acts of incest, violent abuse and alcoholic rage scarred the childhoods of both of them.

They had buried the past though and now needed a revival of hope for family-life in the future. The marriage was kept secret for weeks. On Halloween, when demons are traditionally exorcised, the couple gave an announcement party. In a symbolic extravaganza, the groom arrived disguised as Lazarus, the day after he came back to life; and the bride met him as Sleeping Beauty, the day after she woke up.

We may receive this new heart, this new spirit, when we truly come to believe that God, through Jesus, has forgiven all our sins of the past, and these for all eternity.

In Henrik Ibsen’s drama, Peer Gynt is a tragic figure who wants to do good things and is always trying to start over, but never quite does, and ends up wasting his life in reckless and dissolute living.

He comes at last, an old man with death at his shoulder, to the house of the only one who loved him truly and purely. He sees Solveig, old herself and blind, falls on her threshold, and shouts in agony: “Cry out, cry out my sins aloud! Tell me how sinfully I have offended!”

To which Solveig replies, “You have sinned in nothing, my own dear friend. You have made my life a beautiful song.”

Stunned, Peer Gynt says, “Tell me, then—where was my real self, complete and true—the Peer who bore the stamp of God upon his brow?”

Solvieg answers, “In my faith, in my hope, and in my love.” And she takes the old man and rocks him to sleep in her arms.

There is a Land of Beginning Again, not because of anything we might do in the future, but because of what God has done before the foundation of the world— bestowed His love for us in Christ. We can have a Land of Beginning Again because of the love God pours upon us this day.