“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Corinthians 5:17

I worked at a daycare over the summer. On my last day, God gave me a little parting gift in the form of a conversation I had with two kindergarten-age girls I’d been working with. It might be my favorite story from my time there. I’ll call the girls Beth and Cara for the sake of maintaining privacy.

We’d gone to a park for a field trip, and I was pushing Beth and Cara on the swings. Three boys from a different daycare were playing beside us, but they weren’t playing very nicely. They were pushing and shoving and yelling.

One of the boys noticed my arm, and came up to ask what happened.

“I was born this way,” I told him. “It’s okay. It’s how God made me.”

Cara nodded her head enthusiastically. “We’re all made different,” she said.

Beth added, “Yeah, because the world would be really boring if we were all the same.”

I felt like a mother watching her child take her first steps. Well, maybe not quite to that extreme, but I was proud. I’d been giving my “one-arm” spiel since I’d started at the daycare, but it was hard to tell whether or not the kids really understood what I was saying. But Beth and Cara, they got it. They understood. And now, they were sharing their new understanding of differences with their peers.

The boys lost interest, and continued to shove each other. Beth turned her head back to look at me. “Miss Becca, I don’t think God made them to be so mean to each other,” she said.

“What do you think He made them to do?” I asked her.

“I think He made them to love,” Beth told me.

This led into a short discussion about love, and what it looks like to love someone. Cara took the conversation in a new direction when she announced, “I think we just need to replace their brains!”

I couldn’t help but laugh, but in a way, Cara wasn’t completely wrong.

Like Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5, in Christ, we are new. We aren’t just new-and-improved versions of ourselves. We don’t just upgrade to kinder people who show off more of the fruits of the spirit. We are new.

The old is completely gone! The new has come!

In order to love like Christ loves, we must be new. That means new heart, new mind, new passion, new strength. Even though God doesn’t physically reach down from heaven and replace our brains, we are completely new creations.

Once, we were the boys pushing and shoving on the playground. On our own, that’s all we can ever be.

With Christ at the center of our lives, we can be more. We can be new. We can show love, and we can live as the children of God we were created to be.

Essentially, you can live and love in a way that’s so radically different from the world’s norms that people look at you and think, “Someone must have replaced her brain!”

It might be a silly way to put it, but we are new. We should never forget or underestimate the strength of that terminology.

And also never forget… you are onederfully created in Christ.

Love,
Becca