It’s been an intense few weeks for me.
It feels like it’s been a heavy few weeks as well. Like there’s been quite a lot more to carry than usual. It’s been gruelling and in the last week in particular, it’s felt very challenging.
Obviously in it all, what’s really been important has been watching Batman: Year One.
What’s that? It’s not that obvious? Oh yeah, OK, well …
So I watched the animated movie of Batman: Year One. This isn’t a movie review and I’m not here to commend it to you or whatever. What I found interesting about it was what it had to say about what happens in the first year of a significant undertaking. What experiences can take place and how that can be formative. Formative in how you respond to those experiences as well as formative to how allowing certain things to take place can set in place certain foundations for the future.
This is not to say that whatever is done in that first year must define everything else and the patterns established there will never be broken. It is to say that it’s good to look back on what was put in place in that first year.
So how Batman: Year One helped me was it got me to look back at the ‘first year’s of some of the major undertakings of my life. Look at them as it was at the time and more importantly look at them in the bigger picture of seeking to understand the point of those undertakings.
As someone who makes a profession of loving and following Jesus and who has experienced His love, grace and mercy, I want to ensure that the significant undertakings of my life are centred on Him. That means everything significant I do is done for His glory and that should then inform how and why I do what I do and what that means for shaping things especially in that first year.
That’s what I think now.
That is not always how I have behaved.
Thank God for His grace, though that gives me help in my time of need. Thank God for His mercy when I mess up and that love to build me to learn and slowly but surely grow from such experiences. Grow to be able to do more in the first year. And grow from learning from what happened in the first year.
First impressions don’t have to last. The first year does not have to be the last, if we can learn from the greatest Teacher in life.
(Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 