The High Holy Days

I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want a new start.  Some want everything to start over. Like the two guys sitting at computers looking out at a complete barren landscape and one turns to the other: “Did you just hit ‘Delete history?’

But most of us just want a different job. A different teacher. A new career.  They’d come to that fork in the road and taken the path to a sunset of regrets.  Life doesn’t give us such stark reversals.  It gives us, instead, a new dawn every day. It gives us words of Scripture that help reveal us to ourselves.  And out of the greatest life, out of Yeshua’s life, God gives the incredible gift of grace to know that in Him, we can begin again.

And once a year, at the beginning of the Ten Days of Awe, we begin with the declaration of trumpets: Rosh HaShanah, the New Year—Yom Teruah:  a new beginning.  A new start.  And that’s how we celebrate Creation.  The ultimate new start.  And this is where we have no quarrel with science.  There is a beginning.

“B’reshit bara Elohim…”  In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.  There it is.  The ultimate new start.  And, on one day a year, when we fully accept that we can make a new start, He gives us exactly what we need.

A day to begin again.  A day to reflect. A day to look into our hearts and find forgiveness for ourselves and to consider where He wants us. 

This is a day of great spiritual potential.  We blow trumpets, but how many hearts are waiting to lift a genuine cry to God:  “Help me, Lord, to start over and get things right.”

God truly has that power to make all things new.