Life Has Never Been A Straight Line, But Always A Circle

​With the new year, it's always a bit easier to see life as a big circle. Yes, the year is indeed ending, but at the same time we've simply circled back around to the start of a new year.

Circled back around, but starting anew with all that we learned in the last circle.

I find it interesting this morning, reflecting on this idea of a circular life, that the sun and the moon and the earth, grand characters in this circular nature of life, are all circles.

Was this God's way of telling me from the very beginning, don't get too stuck in a moment? Was this God's way of telling me to never believe that I am in the middle of any sort of ending in life?

Is this why God chose to spin my world into new light each day; rotate my world into a new year every 365 days? So that I would always know that anything that feels like an end in my life is actually a beginning?

And maybe that is one of the enemy's grandest weapons? The weapon of taking moments or experiences or hardships we go through and convincing us they are signs of the end.

That would seem an appropriate weapon battling a God whose message is NOTHING is ever the end. Not even death.

As a parent, I have spent a large part of the last two decades of my life circling back to my own childhood. In doing so, I have found things that make me appreciate how I was parented, and I have made those things a part of me the parent. I have also found things I don't think should be a part of any parenting, and therefore my children have not seen those things, and they will never have those things to circle back to should they ever become dads themselves.

Part of this circular life we live is deciding what comes with us in the next circle. What stays behind. Part of this circular life is becoming increasingly aware that my circle intersects other circles.

I suppose one of the challenges of this circular life is we can believe we have left some things behind, and yet, here those things are again, showing up without warning in some future circle. And we are forced, once again, to somehow believe that this thing that has somehow circled back was not the beginning or the end, it was just a part of my circle.

We are forced once again to do battle with an enemy who wants us to see our lives as straight lines and not circles.

I want to encourage you this day, this year, that when life gets to feeling like a dead end, when life gets to feeling like this is surely the final blow, the last straw, to look at the moon and the sun and the earth, and be reminded that our God is a God of circles.

Our God does not believe in this is the end.

For the hope of heaven is the hope of this earth, in the words of T.S Eliot, "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."

A year has ended.

A year has begun.

Thus is the circle of life.