Small Beginnings

Dear Kalli,

A blogger from Excellence Training wrote, “Do you remember the new beginnings within your life? They are the moments where change begins to take root, and you grew a new part of yourself?  A new version of your life? Perhaps they took the form of your first day at a new school, or a new job, the first time you fell in love, when you learned how to paint, create music, dance, or run. These are the epiphanies that send us into new patterns of thought, or the life changes that catapult us into a new state of being. To become the person you are today, you have experienced a multitude of beginnings. Some of them have been more memorable than others, but all of them are important parts of who you are. ‘Do not despise small beginnings’ – Zechariah 4:10″

In April 1975, Sterling Sill said, “And I thought that inasmuch as this is a season of so many new beginnings I would like to talk to you about birth. However, I don’t mean the birth of Jesus, nor the resurrection, nor the reawakening of nature. I mean your own birth and the great possibilities involved in our own human reawakenings.

Henry David Thoreau, an early American philosopher, once said that we should thank God every day of our lives for the privilege of having been born. And then he went on to speculate on the rather unique supposition of what it might have been like if we had not been born. Just suppose that you had never been born or that your parents or your brothers and sisters or your children or your friends had never been born. Just think of all the excitement and blessings that we would have missed as a consequence. But what Mr. Thoreau may not have known was that one-third of all the children of God never were born and never can be born because they failed to pass the requirements of their first estate.

We remember the unembodied spirits who appeared to Jesus in his day who preferred the bodies of swine rather than to have no bodies at all. (See Matt. 8:28–32; Mark 5:11–13.) And I am very sure that if we could go today while we walk by faith and stand where we once stood when we walked by sight that we would be willing to crawl on our hands and knees through life for this tremendous opportunity which we presently enjoy.

William Wordsworth said that our birth is a sleep and forgetting. There is one distinguishing characteristic about the moment of birth in that it is an unconscious moment; that is, no one ever realizes while he is being born that that event is actually taking place. Sometimes we don’t discover that we have been born until quite a long time afterward. Sometimes we never do find out that we have been born.

I heard one man say about his friend, ‘He doesn’t know he is alive.’ Frequently that strikes very close to the truth. That is, sometimes we don’t know why we were born. We don’t know where we came from. We don’t know the purpose of life. We haven’t any very definite program for just what we are going to do about our eternal destiny.”

I love the thought that there are no endings, just new beginnings, and that each beginning helps us become who we are today.

We love you!

Love,

Sarah H and US