Making Room for the New

Today I took a little walk around the buildings where I work. It is exciting these days around the church. We are beginning a new building project that has been in the works for two years. The first step in the plan is to demolish an old building that has served us well and long. All that remains are a few piles of rubble that will be hauled off tomorrow. The old is making way for the new.

Change can be difficult. We sometimes have to let go of something we have to make room for something we need. It does not lessen the value of what we had, or mean that we don’t carry the a best of our past forward with us into the new. It just means that we are moving forward into our future. And we always move forward shaped by all that went before; the joys and the sorrows, the defeats and the victories, the cherished memories and those things we’d love to forget.

This season we celebrate a moment in time when the past and the future meet in a profound way. Phillips Brooks expressed it in a hymn he wrote for his Sunday School:

Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by

Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

I love the beauty of that last line, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”. We all long for change in our own way. We all fear change will come in our own way. We want more out of life, out of our relationships, out of ourselves. We want to know more of God and God’s way. We hope for change.

Yet, even as we hope, we fear what that change will bring. What will we have to give up to make room for the new? What will it cost? How will change effect those things, and those people, I have counted on in my life? And perhaps the greatest fear for some of us, what will I have to do differently to embrace the very change I hope to experience?

Maybe this Christmas season we need to let “the hopes and fears of all OUR years” come together and trust them to the God who came to us in a little baby. Maybe we bring those hopes and fears and let them go so that our arms are open to embrace the new. We never know what change might bring. But we can be ready.

Peace.