The world is full of beginnings and endings. We begin a new year with a certain hope—another year, another chance, a new day. But we carry with us the same fears, the same longings, the same resolutions. A more cynical riposte might be: Is there ever really anything new about a new year?

When the past or present seems so broken that its shards seem to reach well into the future, new days are often filled more with fear than with promise. I remember a time when I could see the end of a difficult situation, but I could not see a beginning unmarred by the residue of the past. “Is there really such a thing as new day?” was the question I held disconsolately. A friend gave me the following words and asked me to hold them instead:

“But this I call to mind,

and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,

‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:21-24).

Spoken in a time of exile, I imagine these words were as pungent for the people they were spoken to as they were for me. The ancient writer of Lamentations held fast to the assurance of things new, even in the midst of a situation that blinded him from any vision of what that could possibly mean. In all of the suffering and sorrow surrounding him, it would not have been unreasonable for him to admit that he saw no way out. With all the damage that had been done, with the uncertainty of exile, and the finality of a destroyed Jerusalem, no one would have blamed him for seeing new mornings as nothing but a cynical promise of more of the same.

But this was not the lament on his lips. Written in the style of an ancient funeral song, the writer’s words, though consumed with death, call to this God by name: The steadfast love of Yahweh never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. Another translation reads, Because of Yahweh’s great love we are not consumed; his mercies are new every morning. What the writer was able to see in the midst of his own lamentation is that only an all-powerful God can truly make a new beginning, a new creation. And new mornings, new years, in and of themselves, are useless and worse than useless if they are not seen as belonging to the one who makes all things new.

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Topic: Just Thinking Magazine by Ravi Zacharias on December 2, 2016

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes is best known for his dictum “I think, therefore, I am.” A cynic may well quip that Descartes actually put des cart before des horse, because all he could have legitimately deduced was, “I think, therefore, thinking exists.” I do not intend to defend or counter Cartesian philosophy; I only wish to underscore that thinking has much to do with life and certainty.

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life—a life that thinks, thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him.

A person sitting at his desk and staring out of the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree or Archimedes in his bathtub bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensées, a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

The Bible places supreme value in the thought life. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote (Proverbs 23:7). Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay in the idea itself, not just the act. The apostle Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote, “Whatever is true…whatever is pure…if there be any virtue…think on these things” (Philippians 4:8).

The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it is not just to think, but to think justly. But how does one manage this in a culture where progress is determined by pace and defined by quantity?

What is even more destructive is that the greatest demand comes from neither speed nor quantity but rather from the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, music in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining the “on hold” callers add up as impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness.

Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking,” seems frightfully true. The price paid for this scenario has been devastating. Indeed, T.S. Eliot observed in his poem “Choruses from The Rock”:

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