Front Desk Abbi here with a little guest post on our new theme for April, a new thing!
I receive an email every Monday morning, called The Monday Club, from an author and blogger. You can find out more here! Below is an email I received a month or so ago that fit perfectly with this theme. I hope it encourages you today!
God slipped me that verse:
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43:19
And that verse has stuck with me all week. I can’t shake it. So I wanted to share a little story about discovery and what verse means to me today for someone who needs the encouragement and the wisdom packed within those divine words of Isaiah:
When I first found out I was pregnant, I immediately told a friend who prays the big prayers. Before any big announcements. Before I even told my closest people. I pulled up a chair outside a local coffee shop and sought advice from the praying type. Apart from any tip someone could give me about pregnancy or raising a child, I knew I needed to be surrounded by people who talk regularly with God.
In that meeting, my friend told me that I should do a word study in the Bible. To usher in this new season and mark it for good, I should pick a word or phrase and dig in.
That afternoon (because I was eager to begin), I peeled open my Bible, and I sat for a moment to think of the word I wanted to dissect. A single phrase kept ringing in my ears.
A new thing. A new thing. A new thing.
I’d heard this phrase a million times before. It’s one of the most common phrases in the Bible, words that God spoke through the prophet Isaiah:
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
I decided this was an excellent place to begin because it is likely that I have gotten this set of words misconstrued. I’ve likely missed something massive when I’ve quoted this verse in the past. And wasn’t that what a baby ultimately is? A new thing?
I decide to camp out in this place and begin to dig.
Almost immediately, I am FLOORED by the discovery.
In the original Hebrew, the phrase “a new thing” is “chadash.” It means “fresh and new.”
Not surprising.
But, as I looked closer, I realized the root of the word means “to rebuild– renew, repair.” That prefix “re” means “again, and again, and again.”
That word “chadash” means “to REbuild or RE-new,” meaning that the stuff you and I have walked through in the past is being repurposed. It’s being made into something new.
I don’t know about you, but I am often tempted to hide the parts of my story that feel shameful or like I somehow messed up. Even though we are a culture that claims to love to be “broken,” we usually mean we want an edited kind of broken. We want the after pictures alongside the before ones.
But that’s the culture, friend. Some of us have to stop filtering God through the funnel of our culture and begin filtering the culture through the funnel of a big, big God.
When God says he is doing “a new thing” in the Bible, he is leaning in to say, “Hey, I see what you’ve been through. I’m renewing that. I’m renewing you. Again, and again, and again. I’m taking all the old broken pieces, and I am rebuilding you on what you thought might destroy you.”
The things you thought would hinder you might be some of the most necessary building blocks for your story.
What you thought would ruin you might be God’s big plan to rebuild you.
You know you can breathe. Right?
You know you can let go. Right?
You know that nothing you ever do can discount you from playing your part in this story, right?
It turns out that “a new thing,” through God’s lens, is a combination of what already happened and what is yet to come. We need both to see the brightest version of you.
God doesn’t want your crafty editing skills. He wants your broken pieces because he plans to use those to make something even better. Something that is going to spring forth. Something that is going to light up the darkness.
He is using every broken and tired thing to create the new. He is using the stories you swore discounted you, and he is piecing them together, in his mercy, to bring you into something new.
He is not telling a single one of us to act as if we don’t have scars or have never felt the weight of complicated things. It’s a different story. He’s saying, “I can always use what you bring to me. So bring it all. Leave nothing out. No fear, babycakes. No fear.”