Stop Starting Over. Begin instead.

My hate relationship with weight began in my 30s after my second child was born. I no longer looked like my twenty-something self in the mirror and my decades long battle with body image began.  A lifetime Weight Watcher’s (WW) member, I’ve been up and down on the scale, in and out of meetings for over 25 years.  Lifetime status means at some point I achieved my goal weight, maintained it, and the program became free so long as I stayed within 2 pounds of that weight. While intended to be motivational, that two-pound difference felt like a prison some days.

With each passing year, I found the struggle with weight increasing.  Despite doing all the supposed right things with food and exercise, I could not maintain that original weight goal without egregious crankiness. So, I extended a little mercy to myself and increased the number that I deemed acceptable on the scale. 

Now that WW is online, your entire weigh-in history is saved in a graph for you to see. Every time I started over, I had that upward trend line mocking my efforts, reminding me of my lack of discipline and highlighting my past failures in this. The decades of body image shame meant I only saw defeat in that graph.  

When I recommitted to WW, I asked my coach if she could erase my history.  I knew how I got to where I was and didn’t need the mental beating that graph inflicted. I didn’t want start over.  I needed to begin.

Starting over carries baggage, doesn’t it?  There is this element of, tried and failed.  Or, didn’t finish.  Or, something didn’t work out as planned. Life took a sharp right turn without your permission. Your “starting over” might not be diet and fitness.  Maybe it’s that college degree or you are newly single after a relationship ended.  Maybe it’s that you desperately don’t want to melt down, again, when your toddler makes you late, again.   

Beginning is a gentle shift in perspective with profound impact on our lives.  Beginning means there’s no history.  This is all a new experience, a fresh embarking on a story not yet written.

The idea of a new beginning didn’t originate with us. It sprouted in the heart of God who has always been in the business of creating, beginning, making new. Even in the midst of Israel’s darkest moments, he revealed his desires for new. “Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland’ (Isaiah 43:18-19a).  

Roughly 700 years later, Nicodemus, a Jewish Pharisee and scholar of the Scriptures, knowing this promise, was intrigued by Jesus as the possible fulfillment of God’s promised new thing, way in the desert, stream in the wasteland.  Under the cover of night Nicodemus came to see Jesus who taught him that is would be through faith in Jesus as Messiah that we are re-born through the work of the Holy Spirit.  Not re-made. But born again. God does not start over with us. He begins with us.  We are new creations. Every day, in Christ, we are invited to live into becoming who God created us to be. 

The conundrum is that, while faith in Christ makes it so God only sees us through his Son- pure, holy, and righteous – faith in Christ doesn’t provide a Magic Eraser for memories.  Darn it.  We know our past. We have to learn how to begin.

The Apostle Paul knew the importance of this perspective shift. The former persecutor of Christians turned evangelist had every reason to be weighed down by his past. Not only did he have his vehement pursuit to eradicate the new Jesus movement to deal with, he had plenty of experiences as an evangelist we might count as failures. He caused a riot in Ephesus, got his friends in Thessalonica arrested, had to sneak out of town more than once, and, despite his very impassioned speech in Athens, saw only a few come to faith. Most sneered at him.   

If Paul had evaluated his graph he might not have gone to Corinth where he established a vibrant congregation to whom he wrote these words: “Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new” (2 Cor 5:17 MSG).  

I am so glad Paul went to Corinth! I need those words, do you?  Created new was Paul’s reality and it can be ours too. How?  

Paul writes of his own faith journey, “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Ph 3:13b, NIV). Paul didn’t allow the things of his past to keep him from pursuing his goal. He settled those things once and for all. They were no longer part of his graph. Forgetting what was behind, he began.

The writer of Hebrews exhorts us to throw off everything that hinders our growing in faith, to fix our eyes on Jesus – the author and perfecter of our faith. The one in whom we are new creations.   

An attitude of beginning wipes our graph clean. This is true in the big things and in each and every little thing that makes up our day. Our journey will always be imperfect but Christ awaits to walk with us in the newness of today.