Fall is here!  Yes, it is officially!  The air is getting cooler, and crisper.  It is getting darker now, and the leaves are just getting ready to turn the beautiful colors God gave us to stand in awe of his awesome creation.  I enjoy fall for just that reason!  I don’t really like the leaves falling off of the trees, because then we have to clean them up.  However, I know it is a necessary process, that God intended to make our trees, grass and plants new again in the spring.  As I think of fall, it makes me think how we become a new creation in God.  When we proclaim ourselves as sinners, and ask for forgiveness, we become new creations.  When we ask for forgiveness, and ask Jesus to come in our hearts, he tells us that we are new.  But, like the trees, we continue to go through a growth process.  We change like the leaves on the trees, and sometimes we, too, fall from our root of Jesus Christ.  However, we can be make new again, and be picked up off of the ground as we grow and learn from our choices.  I have just read, “Dawn of the ‘Voyage Treader’.”  It is a favorite book of mine in the Chronicles of Narnia.  I love reading about Eustace, who is an odd, greedy, miserable character, who gets turned into a dragon.  He is aware that he has been changed into a dragon, and does not like it one bit.  However, when Aslan comes face to face with him and asks him to scratch, his scales begin to fall off.  Then,as Eustace goes into a well, and comes up out of the water, he becomes himself, a boy again, as a new creation.  Aslan had to take many layers off of Eustace.  Not only his appearance changes on the outside, it changes on the inside.  He becomes new again.  It is an amazing conversion!  I get goose bumps thinking about how God literally allows our sin to fall off of us, through His Son, and His forgiveness.

I understand, that it gets frustrating at times, as we try to keep clean and make choices to not sin.  It is difficult.  I know, I can sin with the best of them!  We know that our sins can be forgiven, and we can be made new at any moment, but how can we change our ways so that we can fight sin and temptation off?  I think of my days in college, living in my sorority.  I am a believer in “cooties.”  I have had a few issues with germs, but due to my kiddos, I have had no choice, but to just deal with them!  My sorority sisters were aware of my issues.  They knew of the one thing that drove me nuts:  having another person in my bed sheets.  So, from time to time, one of the girls would get in my bed and roll around, of course, claiming that they had dirty feet.  I couldn’t handle it, and would have to immediately take my sheets off of my bed and wash them!  It drove me crazy, but they loved laughing their heads off watching me squirm.  How did I learn to deal with it as I was married and had to have someone else in my sheets?  We have a king-size bed!  Also, I have gotten a little better!  I tell this story because this is how we should view sin.  When it comes on us, or gets in our hearts, we should immediately do whatever it takes to make it fall off of us, and get clean.  We can barely get out of bed in the morning without a thought or action that is not of God.  But we have to keep striving to please the Lord, and not others, or ourselves.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, his is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

2 Corinthians 5: 17-19