I am New

Posted on by michaelloewer

Just a heads up, if you are uncomfortable with, or just don’t want to read some guy talking about his faith, then you might want to find another blog post to read this week, because that’s all I write in this post. Also, know that I write this disclaimer to try and be considerate, so as to try and avoid wasting your time, not to try and drive you away.

I am very sorry, but the poem I wanted to insert isn’t working with formatting, so here is a link to the words. It is also a song, so feel free to give it a listen.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/i-am-new-lyrics-jason-gray.html

That poem could be my full blog post. The opening stanza is probably my favorite line that I have ever come across in a poem or song. It’s not good because it has beautiful rhyming, or a clever play on words, or anything special that we talk about when we talk about good poetry, it’s good because it of the truth it speaks. That is my life right there. I cant deny the worst thing that you could think of about me, because on some level, its probably true. But it doesn’t matter, because those things you just thought of don’t define me.

I also love that Jason Gray chooses to repeat the chorus between every verse. We are continually being remade. It is not just a one time thing, it is constant throughout our life. By repeating the chorus over and over, it feels to me like Jason Gray is reminding us of this fact.

Then in stanza five he talks about how its been so long since he has allowed himself to have hope for change. He allowed the shadow of shame has eclipsed his vision of God. In my life God has always been there, but I, like a little child who can’t look his father in the eye, have been afraid to look up. “But the one who is making everything new doesn’t see me the way that I do.”  Even when we don’t look up, because our shame is too strong, God looks down. He sees us in our entirety, and he loves us anyway. That’s pretty crazy. We look at ourselves and see something vile and despicable, and we hope no one else notices. We label ourselves, and think change will never come. But God looks at us and calls us forgiven, beloved, hidden in Christ, made in the image of the Giver of Life, righteous and holy, reborn and remade, accepted and worthy.

 

This is our new name. It’s who we are.

3 thoughts on “I am New”

  1. Michael, I love what you’ve written here. It’s honest and so, so true. When I read through the song/poem, the first stanza stuck out so much to me too, and I’m glad that you expounded on that.

    “He sees us in our entirety, and he loves us anyway. That’s pretty crazy. We look at ourselves and see something vile and despicable, and we hope no one else notices. We label ourselves, and think change will never come” (Paragraph 5). Like you said, this is so crazy. We serve a crazy God. To think that he sees all of our wretchedness and still choses to love us and see good in us is beyond my understanding. God doesn’t make any sense some of the time (or most of the time)– his ways are so much higher and so much more loving and beautiful than our own.

    I always admire the way that you are so open and yourself when you write. You can harness your voice in a collection of words, which is something that requires skill. You write like you talk to people, which makes you seem approachable even as a writer. Your disclaimer in the very beginning invites your reader to be apart of what you are saying. I would suggest, then, keeping yourself evident throughout your whole post. After your paragraph about the song’s first stanza, we loose you and your ideas to Jason Gray and his ideas. It is hard, of course, when you’re analyzing someone else’s works to be inputting yourself into what you’re saying about them, but I think it’s still very important. We read Jason Gray’s poem/song, and now we’re coming to you to see what you have to say about it and how it effects you. What I think you should do is this– because you are so good at writing in YOUR voice, you should use that to your advantage and expound even more on that. Your voice is what makes your writing unique, and so you should always be making sure that you don’t loose that to your desire to simply say what you need to say quickly.

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