Word

The church I've been attending the past few weeks asked everyone to choose a word for 2017. I wasn't there at the beginning of the year, so I was late to this party, and in fact just got a blank card for my word last week. I didn't know what my word was going to be, except that it was definitely not going to be "New," because that's what my life has been about for two years and I'm ready for different fun now.

The church meets here.
They don't own the building.
I don't know what it used to be.

But because my brain has this really irritating tendency to grab hold of one thought forever and ever, amen, once I thought, "Definitely not 'new'," the verse in 2 Corinthians, "Therefore if anyone be in Christ, she is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new," lodged in my brain and wouldn't get out again. (That's the KJV, because I love the phrasing of "all things are become new." Also made a couple small gender modifications because I'm a she, it's Greek, "he" is not in the original, etc. If that bothers you, I don't mind.) So I brought my card home still blank.

Sunday morning, after a day out of town, I rolled back into my apartment just long enough to put my stuff down and see my blank card still sitting here all empty, which got the brain puttering along in the "all things are become new" rut it's settled into. When I got to church, there was an entire stack of blank cards and a request that we all write down our words so we could be mutually encouraged by the words that had been chosen. Into my head pops 2 Corinthians 5:17 (I do hope you're reading that as "second Corinthians" and not any alternative phrasing), followed by "The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation." Yeah, okay, if my brain is going to make connections I may as well run with it. (Watch that entire clip only at your own risk.)

Creation. Creation is my word for 2017. Here goes.