All Things New

Truths of transformation in snow and Scripture

1. Birth.

My brother and sister-in-law welcomed their first baby last month. Each day I see new pictures, I catch my breath at how time loops. The look on these proud, exhausted, wonder-brimmed parents’ faces is the same I see in my children’s baby books, the same I see in my own. Proof of awe. 

First pictures of parent and child are not like posed photos, the common kind where we smile straight at the camera or look out together upon the same view. Instead this is the inward, all-consuming gaze of beholding: you are my beloved, a whole world unto yourself. 

I cannot drink in enough of you.

The freshness of a new face is astounding, a creature from another planet. People are quick to call small wizened ones old souls but I always think: no, quite the opposite. This is what it looks like to be utterly new. 

To stare at everything and everyone without prejudice or preconception. To soak in the surroundings like a sponge. To encounter the entire world as foreign. Little wonder our burgeoning brains need to sleep and sleep in those early days, drilling down tunnel after tunnel of sparking synapses to connect everything we encounter.

All things new.

2. Renewal

Say what you will about winter (and I say plenty): a solid snowstorm remakes the world.

Bathed in light, blanketed in white, familiar forms turn strange, rounded into new realities. Rooflines and mailboxes and cars parked on the street soften into ghosts. Each branch is feathered with fur, each twig bears its own icing. The evergreens are draped in heavy sleeves; the lampposts wear jaunty hats. Nothing looks the same as before. 

Every settling snowstorm reminds me that the biggest changes to our landscapes are not of our own making. Despite New Year’s enduring, enticing temptation to believe it’s all up to our willpower, we cannot self-renew. 

Making all things new is not our work, but God’s.

3. Resurrection

Magic would have been His eyes fluttering open when the soldiers reached to pull him down from the cross. A quick gotcha, a cruel revenge, the magician’s trick. 

Instead his friends had to clean him, shroud him, anoint him, and carry his cold body to the colder tomb. 

Long lonely hours passed like years: their fog of grief, his mysterious work done in the dark, descending to depths we can only guess. Tradition calls this time the harrowing of hell. Before He could make all things new, He surrendered to their undoing, becoming like us in all things, even death. 

We had to wait for His return. (We are still waiting to see what comes next.)

If we expect a single magical moment to transform our lives, we will be let down. Do we become different people once the vows are spoken or the baby born or the calendar turned to January? No. Change and conversion take a long time in ordinary lives, the barren winter before the electric eruption of spring.

Mystery runs deeper than magic.

Even resurrection took time, surrender, and the holy dark.

4. Heaven.

I will never forget today, I tell my son as our car creeps home in the snow, Nutcracker music ringing in our ears, savoring the sweetness of a salvaged field trip when the storm almost made it not.

Will you remember it even when you’re in heaven? He asks, grinning in the rearview mirror.

A delightful question, and I have no idea how to respond. Children are my favorite theologians, forever phrasing truths with jarring twists. Do souls have memories? Can we remember earth once we are gone? I think we do but I do not know. 

Revelation tells us that the all-new-making will extend everywhere: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

When do we let ourselves pause with that strange truth? Not only the earth on which we walk and live and work but even heaven itself—every place will become new. 

Renewal will come to the used-up, worn-out planet we’re in the process of destroying, but also the bright brilliance of paradise—already shining and perfect somewhere in the beyond of time and space—even all that glory will be made new, so totalizing will the final transformation become. What will that radical renewal do to us, too?

I think our souls must remember all the love we knew, I tell him.

So I could never forget you. And I could never forget today.

5. Revelation.

The text is always present tense, no matter the translation. A statement of faith, forever and ongoing.

Behold, I make all things new. 

See, I am making all things new.

I am making everything new!

All things new. Not one lofty resolution of our own making. Not simply the shiny parts of ourselves we think are on the way. But the broken parts, the hidden parts, the shameful, lost, forgotten, feared-forsaken parts of ourselves. 

Human systems of oppression, the destruction of creation, our collective collaboration with evil in what we have done and what we have failed to do—every last inch of it will be undone and redone by redemption. Made new by Mercy Unceasing who numbers the stars and the hairs on our heads.

Lately I can’t stop thinking about the audacity of making all things new. Not some, not a few. Not only the good ones already on their way. But all. 

How would we live if we believe in a God who makes all things new? 

What relief 

or release 

or hope 

or healing 

might that bring? 

Not my brother or nephew. But the same joy. Also how God holds & beholds us.