New Every Morning

 

I have pondered and pondered about what to write this week. I thought about making a list of suggestions for how to approach a new year. I considered inviting you to list your best ideas or some inspirational verses. But the truth is this: we have a book full of inspirational verses; we just need to read and obey it. We all have great ideas for how to make the new year the best it can be, to give ourselves motivation and incentive. (Can there really be any better incentive than that God wants us to love him and love others?)

No matter what I thought of, I kept coming back to this poem. I have probably shared it before and may do so again. It’s worth a re-read. I hope you take it to heart.

New Every Morning
Susan Coolidge

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,—
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over;
The tasks are done and the tears are shed.
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,
With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot re-live them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in his mercy receive, forgive them!
Only the new days are our own;
To-day is ours, and to-day alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,
Here is the spent earth all re-born,
Here are the tired limbs springing lightly
To face the sun and to share with the morn
In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

Happy New Day, Friends!

--Sherry Poff