New Every Morning

I live in the Appalachian Mountains (the part that pronounces it APP-uh-LAY-shun, not LATCH-uhn, thank you). My house is in the middle of a forest, trees towering all around. Here, we can track the drift of the seasons quite easily, as leaves first bud in a splendor of white and yellow and pink, then spread a curtain of brightest green over the hillsides, then darken to emerald, then move into a fire of red and orange and yellow, then drift away into brown and the gray of bare limbs.

Those changing seasons never fail to make me smile in appreciation. But they’re a slow crawl, over the course of the year. The landscape doesn’t do rapid changes–and if it does, it’s usually a bad thing. Trees downed by a storm, gullies carved by a flood.

The other day, though, as my husband and I were walking the beach during our vacation, I realized that one of the reasons I love escaping to a place like this for my holiday is because literally every morning, it’s new.

The tides are constantly changing, and changing the beach with it. One day it will be still and calm, the tide will be out, and the beach will be wide and solid and undisturbed. The next day, the waves will be frothing, the wind will be whipping, wiping out any hint of human footprints, and the tide will be carving cliffs into the sand. When we set off from our rented house, we can see glimpses of the ocean from our upper decks, but we have no idea what the beach will look like. Not until we trek along the wandering path over the dunes, evading cacti and burrs and swatting at mosquitos, and then finally emerge into the loose sand.

Will the beach be wide or narrow today? Is the tide in or out? Soft sand or hard? Windswept clean or still bearing yesterday’s footprints? 

It’s new. Every morning, it’s new. And if you stay down there long enough, you can watch it renew itself with every surge of the tide in and draw of it out. And as I walk the waterline, those verses fill my head each and every time. 

“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.”
~ Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)

Perhaps it’s strange that I ponder the steadfastness of the Lord thanks to a landscape that’s ever-shifting. Perhaps something as capricious as a tide shouldn’t make me think about His faithfulness. Or maybe it’s the contrast that makes the truth so bright.

Maybe it’s because, as ever-changing as this landscape is, it’s also everlasting in its changes, a cycle that doesn’t stop. And isn’t that like the Lord? He doesn’t always speak to us in the same ways, He doesn’t always answer prayers in the way we expect Him to, He doesn’t always give us the same thing in each season…but He’s always there. Always working. So big that He holds the universe in His palm, so exact that He knows how to speak to each heart in the way that will best help us.

His love never stops. And while in some seasons we might sense it like those towering trees or rolling mountains–always there, surrounding us–I think quite often we experience His love like a tide. Sometimes it’s surging high, sometimes our perception of it ebbs. But like the tide, it’s always there, always cycling, always moving. Like the tides, it never ends.

And like the landscape carved by those tides, we can let Him make us new every morning, just as His mercies are.

I love that these verses are from Lamentations, a book literally about grieving and mourning and calling out to the God that hasn’t forsaken His people, even when His people have forsaken Him. It’s in the midst of those tears that the prophet gives us this promise.

Great is His faithfulness. Morning by morning, new mercies are there for us to behold.

What do they look like today in your life?