“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.”
1 Peter 1:22-23
Dear friends,
I heard the peepers! Those loud little frogs who start making their spring song in ponds and wet places are one of the very first signs of spring. In this season of practicing resurrection, we wait anxiously for the signs of new life around us. It’s so good to see the green arriving, to feel the temperature warming and the days growing longer after the winter season.
Of course, everywhere I drive these days, I also see the piles of dead branches that lie waiting to be gotten rid of. My garden needs to be cleared of brush so that the tender new shoots of the spring bulbs and bushes can appear. In our own lives, we share a similar sense of clearing away that which is life-less so that new life can be generated. This being “born again” is at the very heart of our Christian story, especially as we remember the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in the weeks to come.
There is only one place in the New Testament that uses the phrase “born again.” Yet the notion of finding new life, of experiencing transformation through our faith, is central to the nature of our journey as Christ’s followers. In his book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg describes this journey as a process of personal spiritual transformation in which we find our way to our authentic selves and into a deeper relationship with God. It’s an experience that can happen suddenly, yet also happens over a lifetime as we experience the dying and rising of life’s endings and beginnings.
Where are the dead places in your life? What are the things that you must die to – let go of, cast off, or leave behind – in order to be born again to live more fully into something new? Maybe it’s an old habit, or a prejudice, or a perceived limitation of some kind. Perhaps it’s a fear or an unhealthy attachment to something. It could be finding the courage to meet a new challenge that offers the possibilities of something radically new in your life.
As we move into these after-Easter days, may you be born again, finding deeper meaning and transformation in clearing out the “dead brush” of our life!
Blessings for Eastertide,
Karen Nell
“’Dying and rising’ and ‘to be born again’ are the same ‘root image’ for the process of personal transformation at the center of the Christian life: to be born again involves death and resurrection. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born to a new identity—a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in Spirit, in Christ, in God.”
–Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity