What makes us new?

It’s that time of year when a frequent refrain is that everyone is “over it.” They’re ready for a fresh start, a new leaf.

“I’m tired of everyone and everything,” read a post on social media. “Bring on the new year.”

It raises a thought-provoking question. What makes us new? The inexorable march of time? Our efforts to reinvent ourselves when the calendar tells us to?

A hymn in the “Christian Science Hymnal” flips the script when it says, “O Life that maketh all things new” (Samuel Longfellow, No. 218), indicating that the ceaselessness of divine Life, a Bible-based name for God, is the ever-present renewing power. It restores, regenerates, and brings freshness to our lives – no matter the season.

More than anyone else, Christ Jesus proved this power of God, Life, to renew and redeem. In his presence, those who’d done wrong found they could do differently – and feel a cleansing, life-restoring sense of being forgiven. Those whose bodies were broken or diseased found healing – and a life-affirming freedom.

And yet, even more foundational than the healings was the entirely new view of Life that Jesus revealed to humanity. He called it the kingdom of heaven, and everywhere he went, he greeted people with the news that this kingdom is already here – “at hand” (Matthew 4:17). Just think of the hope, the joyful feeling of newness, that must have bubbled up in his listeners’ hearts when they heard these words. The wait was over. Heaven was here!

Even the smallest acknowledgment of this spiritual reality must have set their lives on a brand-new trajectory. God was no longer far off and abstract, but the living Love that they could experience today.

And so, too, it is for us. We are promised that “of his kingdom there shall be no end,” as the angel says to Jesus’ mother, Mary (Luke 1:33). While it may seem as though our lives are wrapped up in timelines, limitations, and all the other traps and trappings of mortality, the opposite is true. We aren’t mortals destined to an early peak and then inevitable decline, but Life’s own expression – wholly spiritual, and therefore perpetually new. It’s the Christ that makes this evident to us and compels us to live more fully from this basis.

The discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, identified Christ not as the man Jesus, but as “his divine nature, the godliness which animated him” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 26). This animating power of Life is just as present now, and just as actively makes this heavenly kingdom apparent to us. And because this is God’s power, not something self-generated, we can depend on it to continually bless us with a renewed sense of things – sometimes even before we ask.

That was the case for me last December when I was feeling burdened and run down during the last gray weeks of the year. One afternoon while I was out running errands, I felt impelled to take a moment to do a favor for a stranger. Honestly, it didn’t seem like a big deal, yet with that act I felt a tide of newness rise up and wash over me. Gone were the end-of-year blahs. I felt utterly restored – and that feeling carried me into the New Year.

What happened? I think Mrs. Eddy explained it best when she wrote, “... Love alone is Life” (“Poems,” p. 7). As I experienced that day, one of the ways Life makes us new is through love – through not only feeling the presence of divine Love but also living love ourselves.

Can we think of anything more valuable – or more transformative – for the world? To know that we not only reside in God’s kingdom now but that we can live and love the way citizens of this kingdom do? It’s this deeply Christian love that brings hope to the world-weary, healing to the heavy-hearted, and the promise of progress to the fearful and dispirited who are wondering if there’s even a way forward.

Newness, it turns out, is guaranteed. Our prayers can reassure us that since we are actually Life’s expression, God’s spiritual likeness, newness is indeed innate to our lives – because it is Life itself that makes us, everyone, and all things new, no matter the need or the season. We can count on it.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Dec. 9, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.