Be Opened

There are several moments throughout the calendar year when we are tricked into thinking we can reinvent ourselves.

One of them is New Year’s Day. The barista at my coffee shop told me that they sell more decaf coffee in January than in the entirety of the remaining year, because everyone is swearing off caffeine. By February, she said, the trend subsides: folks have realized they’re not actually superheroes just because the last digit of the year has increased by one.

The beginning of a new school year is another of those moments. Every pencil is freshly sharpened, and every lesson plan is painstakingly plotted. Our heads are full of what we plan to do this year, how we plan to do it, who we plan to become.

But by May, the wind is out of our sails. We’ve learned the concepts, we’ve used up the pencils, yes — but we’ve remembered that underneath it all we’re basically the same people, with the same shortcomings and the same obstacles as we always were. The only difference in September was we had new planners.

The truth is that we cannot reinvent ourselves. We can’t change ourselves at all, not on New Year’s Day or the first day of school or on our 40th birthday or after quitting a bad habit. We are what we are: blind in some ways, deaf in others, crippled in still more, moving through life with uncertainty, stumbling in the dark.

People don’t change. Not without miracles.

But being a Christian means believing in miracles and being ready for them at any moment — in January or in September, in the middle of a hopeless week or at the end of a bad day, when you feel strong and when you don’t, when you want to be better and when you feel too tired to try.

No, we can’t change ourselves, but we can be changed. There is one who can change us if we will let him. He is waiting — now, tomorrow, yesterday, next week. The time is always right for a miracle.

“He put his finger into the man’s ears … and said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’— that is, ‘Be opened!’ —And immediately the man’s ears were opened …” Mark 7:34-35

©LPi