Tag Archives: New Beginnings

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 9: Can You See It?

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Read Isaiah 43:18–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the one sitting on the throne said, ‘Look, I am making everything new!’ And then he said to me, ‘Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:5 NLT)

Two groundhogs emerge from their burrow at dawn in a Pennsylvania landscape. Bare trees and lingering frost surround them, while tiny green shoots and warm sunlight quietly reveal that spring has already begun.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Can You See It?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

During the last couple of years I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew spring had arrived when the groundhogs began appearing. First, I would see Mama and Papa Groundhog venturing out again. Then, later in the spring, their pups would emerge and begin exploring the world around them.

And no—they never appeared on Groundhog Day.

They followed no human calendar and waited for no ceremonial announcement. By the time I saw them, the changing season was already underway. Life had been stirring beneath the ground before any groundhog—or pastor—appeared above it.

That is the tension within God’s question through Isaiah: “I have already begun! Do you not see it?” God is not merely promising that something new will happen eventually. God declares that the new thing is already emerging, even while the wilderness still looks like a wilderness.

These words were not written by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah himself. They come from a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking to the people of Judah during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the people were living far from home under foreign rule. They needed more than a comforting memory of what God had once done; they needed to recognize what God was beginning to do among them now.

The exiles knew what God had done before. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, with no visible road to freedom. Then God divided the waters and made a way where no way appeared possible. The Exodus became the defining testimony of Israel’s deliverance—a sacred memory passed from one generation to the next.

Yet Isaiah declares, “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.” God is not commanding the people to erase their history or diminish what God had done. In fact, the verses immediately preceding this passage deliberately invoke the Exodus. The past still testifies to God’s faithful character.

The warning concerns what happens when sacred memory becomes a boundary around what God may do next.

Before, God made a road through the sea. Now, God promises a road through the wilderness. Before, God divided the waters. Now, God promises to bring water into a wasteland. The landscape changes. The method changes. God’s faithfulness remains.

The people knew how to recognize the God who made a road through the sea. The question was whether they could recognize that same God making a road through unfamiliar terrain.

God declares, “I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

That question suggests something unsettling: God’s new work may already be emerging while God’s people remain unable—or unwilling—to perceive it. They may be staring toward the sea, waiting for familiar waters to divide, while life is already breaking through somewhere else.

This does not mean that everything new comes from God. Newness alone is not evidence of holiness. Not every innovation is faithful, every disruption is deliverance, or every promise of change is life-giving. Institutions can adopt new language, introduce new programs, and advertise new visions without confronting injustice, relinquishing control, or changing anything substantive.

God’s new work must be discerned according to God’s revealed character. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Does it cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Does it tell the truth, practice mercy, pursue justice, extend hospitality, loosen bonds, and restore life?

Discernment protects us from two equal dangers: worshiping novelty simply because it is new and rejecting God’s work simply because it is unfamiliar.

The second danger can be particularly difficult for churches and institutions to recognize. We may pray passionately for renewal while quietly prescribing what renewal must look like. It must use our familiar language, preserve our established structures, affirm our existing authority, and resemble a previous season when God’s presence seemed especially clear.

A testimony can become a template. A former movement can become a monument. Nostalgia can disguise itself as faithfulness.

Then, when new life begins emerging through unfamiliar people, overlooked communities, or places we had dismissed as barren, we may resist the very renewal for which we prayed. We may conclude that God is absent because God is not working through the people, practices, and patterns we expected.

The same temptation exists within us personally. We can become attached to the way God once met us, the work through which we once served, what once gave our lives meaning, or the person we once believed we had to be. Those memories may remain sacred, but they do not have to dictate our future. Honoring who we have been does not require us to remain there.

Sometimes the new thing God is revealing is not an opportunity appearing outside us, but a truer life already emerging within us. It may begin quietly—small enough to overlook, unfamiliar enough to mistrust, and alive before anyone else recognizes or approves it.

The past testifies that God makes ways where none appear possible. Faith trusts that God is not restricted to making the same way twice. Honestly, I praise Jesus for that!

Friends, the new thing may already be emerging.

Can you see it?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s faithfulness does not require God to repeat the past.

PRAYER
Faithful God, free us from confusing familiarity with faithfulness. Teach us to honor what you have done without restricting what you may do next. Give us wisdom to discern your character, courage to recognize your new work, and faith to follow the road you are creating. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, part 7: There’s No “Without” in God

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Read Exodus 33:12–17

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

A modern congregation sits in a warm wooden sanctuary as the center aisle opens into a wilderness road. Worshipers transition into the mixed multitude journeying toward Mount Sinai beneath radiant clouds, joining present-day worship with God’s covenant-forming presence in Exodus.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “There’s No ‘Without’ in God” at Life-Giving Water Devotions

When I sat down for worship on the first Sunday of my new appointment just a few short weeks ago, I did not yet have my bearings straight.

I did not fully know the order of worship or how everything moved. The people, patterns, and particulars were still unfamiliar to me. After spending time away from the regular rhythms of pastoral ministry during my renewal leave, I might have expected the experience to feel strange.

Instead, I felt at home.

The prayers, music, Scripture, sanctuary, and people gathered around me formed a rhythm I already knew. I did not need to understand every detail before I could enter into it. I still do not know exactly how I fit within these particular communities, but I recognize the life we are sharing.

So, in those first worship services that first Sunday, the unfamiliar was being held by something familiar…and it still is.

That experience does not give me a complete map of what lies ahead. It does not instantly answer every question or remove every uncertainty. But it reminds me that I am not beginning from nowhere. God’s presence is already here—in the worship, within the gathered community, throughout the surroundings, and within me.

Moses also knows what it means to face a new beginning without having his bearings straight.

The people of Israel have escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, and entered the wilderness. They have endured hunger, thirst, fear, conflict, and uncertainty. Then, while Moses is on Mount Sinai, they fashion a golden calf and worship it. The covenant has scarcely been established before it is violated.

Yet the journey must continue.

God tells Moses to lead the people forward, but Moses is not willing to settle for a destination. The promise of land is not enough. Survival is not enough. Even success is not enough.

“If you don’t personally go with us,” Moses says, “don’t make us leave this place.”

Moses understands that reaching the promised land without God’s presence would not be the fulfillment of God’s promise. It would only be arriving somewhere else.

A destination can be reached without faithfulness. A goal can be accomplished without love. An institution can survive without serving the purpose for which it was created. Something can succeed by every measurable standard and still bear little resemblance to the character of God.

The promised land without God’s presence would be only land.

So Moses refuses to go without God.

But how do people recognize the presence of a God who cannot be contained within any single place, person, feeling, or experience?

Sometimes God’s presence becomes tangible through another person—someone who stays, listens, carries, feeds, challenges, advocates, or walks beside us. Sometimes it surrounds us through a community whose shared life gives us somewhere to belong. At other times, it meets us through an unexpected opportunity, a timely interruption, a place of refuge, the natural world, music, art, memory, rest, resistance, or the sudden opening of a way we could not see before.

God’s presence takes more forms than we can name and often reaches us through instruments we were never taught to recognize.

That was already true of the people journeying with Moses. Exodus tells us that a “rabble of non-Israelites” also left Egypt with Israel. Other translations call them a “mixed multitude.” They were not merely outsiders traveling beside God’s covenant people. At Sinai, this varied multitude was gathered together and constituted as Israel—the covenant people of God. Israel had been Jacob’s name and the identity of his descendants; now God was forming a wider group of people, claiming them as God’s own, and leading them toward land promised to their ancestors.

That makes what follows even more startling. Before Moses descends from the mountain carrying the tablets of the covenant, the people fashion the golden calf. Almost immediately after being constituted as God’s covenant community, they violate that covenant. Yet even after this profound failure, Moses pleads for God’s presence to remain with the whole people.

And, as can be seen, God’s community was already larger and more complicated than a neatly guarded religious boundary.

That should matter to Christians.

We sometimes behave as though God’s presence can be found only among Christian people, inside Christian buildings, through Christian language, or within experiences carrying an approved Christian label. Yet God has never been limited by the boundaries we construct.

The person through whom grace reaches us may share our faith. That person may not. We may encounter God within a sanctuary, but we may also encounter God in a hospital room, a recovery meeting, a forest, a coffee shop, a concert, a protest, or around a kitchen table. God may speak through Scripture and prayer, but God may also reach us through people whom religious institutions have dismissed, distrusted, or excluded.

Grace does not wait for us to verify the religious credentials of its instruments before reaching us through them.

This does not mean that every voice, impulse, institution, or opportunity represents God. Discernment still matters. Moses gives us a way to begin that discernment: God’s presence cannot be separated from God’s character.

Where people are being driven back into bondage, we should hesitate before calling it God’s will. Where power is protected at the expense of vulnerable people, invoking God’s name does not make the work holy. Where conformity is demanded while compassion is withheld, religious language may be plentiful while the character of God is nowhere to be seen.

This is where Moses’ prayer becomes uncomfortable for the church.

Would we rather remain in the wilderness than reach a seemingly successful future without mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love?

Churches can pursue growth without discipleship, stability without faithfulness, unity without justice, tradition without living memory, and mission without love. We can become so determined to preserve an institution, complete a project, protect a reputation, or reach a destination that God’s presence becomes something we invoke only after our plans have been settled.

Moses refuses to use God as a ceremonial endorsement of the people’s journey. God must remain at its center.

For Christians, Jesus offers the same promise of presence at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus sends the disciples toward people, places, and circumstances they cannot yet imagine. They receive a mission, but not a detailed map. They are not promised ease, universal acceptance, institutional security, or visible success.

They are promised, “I am with you always.”

Jesus does not promise that they will never go without anything. They will sometimes go without certainty, comfort, approval, safety, and familiar landmarks. But they will not undertake the journey without Christ.

There may be plenty of “without” along the way, but there is no journey without God.

God’s presence may surround us before we have learned the order, found our bearings, or understood how everything moves. It may meet us through a familiar rhythm in an unfamiliar place. It may become visible in the companion beside us, the multitude surrounding us, the provision sustaining us, the beauty awakening us, the truth unsettling us, the resistance strengthening us, or the path opening before us.

The question is not merely whether God is present.

The question is whether we are paying attention to the many ways God may be present—and whether we are willing to refuse any destination that requires us to leave God’s character behind.

Moses would rather remain in the wilderness with God than reach the promised land without God.

Would we?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
No destination is truly promised land if reaching it requires us to leave the character of God behind.

PRAYER
Ever-present God, sharpen our vision so that we may recognize your presence in people, places, and forms we might otherwise overlook. Keep us from mistaking success for faithfulness or religious language for holiness. Wherever you lead, help us walk with the varied multitude you gather in mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 4: The God Who Goes With Us

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Read Genesis 12:1–9

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

A lone hiker pauses beside a carefully stacked stone cairn on a forest trail at sunrise. Golden light filters through towering pines as the winding path disappears into the distance, symbolizing the journey of faith and the quiet practice of remembering where God has been encountered along the way.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The God Who Goes With Us” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

A few weeks ago, my family and I packed up our lives and moved to Mount Holly to begin a new chapter in my ministry. As exciting as a new beginning can be, it also means learning an entirely new rhythm of life. New neighbors. New roads. New routines. Right now, my phone rarely leaves its place on the dashboard. Every trip to one of my churches, the grocery store, or just about anywhere else begins the same way: I enter an address and follow the next turn. For now, I’m still learning the roads. I’m trusting the directions one turn at a time.

Abram knew something about new beginnings. Unlike me, however, there was no GPS guiding each turn. There was no detailed map, no carefully planned itinerary, and no assurance of exactly what lay ahead. There was simply an invitation: “Go…to the land I will show you.”

We often read that invitation as if Abram already knew exactly who was speaking. After all, we know how the story unfolds. We know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We know Moses, the Exodus, the prophets, the cross, and the empty tomb. Abram knew none of that.

There was no Bible to open. No covenant people. No history of God’s faithfulness stretching back through generations. Abram came from a world filled with many gods and many voices claiming authority. Before Abram could trust the promise, Abram first had to decide whether to trust the One making it. Faith began, not with certainty, but with relationship.

That relationship unfolded one encounter at a time.

When Abram arrived in Canaan, the journey was far from over. God’s promise had not yet been fulfilled. Yet the Lord appeared to Abram, and Abram built an altar. Then he journeyed on. God met him again, and another altar was built. Then the journey continued.

Those altars were not monuments celebrating that Abram had finally arrived. They were witnesses to an unfolding relationship. Each one quietly declared, “I met the Holy One here.” As the journey continued, another altar testified, “And here as well.”

How often do we miss those moments in our own lives?

We spend so much time looking toward the next destination that we overlook the evidence of God’s presence where we already stand. We ask God to reveal the whole map while ignoring the places where grace has already met us. We keep looking for proof that God is ahead of us, while the journey itself is becoming the evidence that God has been with us all along.

The church can make the same mistake. We become captivated by strategic plans, attendance goals, capital campaigns, and visions of what comes next. Planning is not the problem. But when our plans become more important than paying attention to God’s presence among us, we risk missing the very One we claim to follow. Before asking where God is taking us, perhaps we should first ask, “Where has God already met us?”

Jesus closes Matthew’s Gospel with a promise that echoes God’s invitation to Abram: “I am with you always.” Once again, God does not promise certainty. There is no detailed itinerary, no guarantee of an easy road, and no assurance that every question will be answered before the next step is taken. Instead, Jesus offers the same promise Abram had been discovering all along: presence.

Perhaps that’s why Abram kept building altars. They were acts of worship, but they were also acts of remembrance. Each altar became a testimony that the God who had called him was also the God who had met him—here…and here…and here again. They reminded Abram that the journey itself had become sacred because every step revealed another encounter with the Holy One.

We still build altars today, though they rarely look like piles of stone. They are the Bible worn soft from years of prayer, the journal filled with moments of grace, the waters of baptism, the bread and cup shared at Christ’s table, the photograph that reminds us of how far we’ve come, the hospital room where hope returned, the cemetery where resurrection became more than a doctrine, and the stories we tell of the places where we knew we were not alone. None of these things contain God. They simply remind us where we encountered God.

Perhaps one of the most important spiritual disciplines is learning to remember. In a world consumed with reaching the next destination, faith invites us to pause and build altars of remembrance. Every story of God’s faithfulness becomes another stone. Every remembered act of grace becomes another witness. Over time, our lives themselves become living altars, quietly proclaiming that wherever the journey has taken us, the Holy One has been there all along.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The journey of faith is not measured by how far we have traveled, but by how many places we have learned to recognize the presence of God.

PRAYER
Faithful God, when we long for certainty, teach us to trust your presence. Open our eyes to remember where you have met us, and may our lives become living altars that bear witness to your faithfulness. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional

God Was Already Here

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Read Genesis 28:10–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.” (Acts 16:14 NRSVue)

A winding yellow brick road stretches through a peaceful countryside at sunrise, leading toward distant hills beneath a glowing sky. A weathered stone rests beside the road, subtly recalling Jacob's pillow, while the warm morning light suggests both new beginnings and the quiet realization that holy ground has been present all along.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “God Was Already Here” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I’ve always had a soft spot for The Wizard of Oz. It remains one of my favorite films, and I’ve watched it many times over the course of my life. As a child, it captured my imagination. The Wicked Witch of the West terrified me, yet I couldn’t look away. Like many children, I saw the story as a simple battle between good and evil.

As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve come to appreciate that the story is far more nuanced than I first realized. The Wicked Witch is certainly the villain, but she isn’t simply wicked for wickedness’s sake. Dorothy’s unexpected arrival sets tragedy in motion. A house falls from the sky, her sister is killed, and the shoes she believes belong to her are suddenly worn by someone else. None of that excuses her choices, but it reminds me that stories—and people—are often more complicated than they first appear.

Still, the moment that has stayed with me most isn’t the Witch or even the Wizard. It’s the ending. Dorothy has finally defeated the Witch. The Wizard’s promises have fallen apart. The journey seems over, yet the one thing she still longs for—home—remains just out of reach. Then Glinda gently reveals what Dorothy never imagined: the means to return home had been with her almost the entire journey. The slippers hadn’t changed. Dorothy had. What she needed was not something new, but new eyes to recognize what had been there all along.

As I write this, I am sitting at my desk on the first day of a new season of ministry. The months leading here were filled with spiritual renewal, prayer, healing, waiting, and rediscovering joy. Looking back, I realize that while I thought I was preparing for whatever came next, God was quietly preparing me to recognize work that had already begun.

That realization brings me to Jacob.

Fleeing uncertainty, Jacob stops for the night with nothing more than a stone for a pillow. While he sleeps, he dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it. When he awakens, he doesn’t declare that God has suddenly arrived. Instead, he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

The ground had not become holy overnight.

Jacob had simply awakened to a holiness that had always been there.

The same pattern appears again in the book of Acts. When Paul meets Lydia by the river, Scripture tells us that the Lord had already opened her heart. Paul did not manufacture faith. He did not bring God’s presence into Lydia’s life. He became a witness to the work God had already begun.

How often do we make the same mistake?

We begin a new job and wonder what we will accomplish.

We move into a new neighborhood and wonder how we will make a difference.

We join a new church and ask what ministry we will build.

Yet Scripture gently redirects our attention. Before we ever arrive, God is already there. Before we ever speak, the Holy Spirit is already moving. Before we ever begin serving, grace has already gone ahead of us.

We are not the authors of God’s work. We are witnesses to it.

That truth is both humbling and liberating. It reminds us that the success of God’s Kingdom does not rest on our shoulders. Our calling is not to create God’s presence, but to recognize it. Not to initiate grace, but to participate in it. Not to bring Christ into the world, but to join Christ where the Holy One is already at work.

Wherever you find yourself today—a new season, a new challenge, a new relationship, or simply another ordinary day—perhaps the most faithful prayer is not, “God, come here.”

Perhaps it is:

“Open my eyes.”

You may discover, like Jacob, that the ground beneath your feet is holier than you ever imagined.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Faith begins not by bringing God somewhere new, but by recognizing the Holy One who has been there all along.

PRAYER
Holy One, thank You for always going before us. Open our eyes to recognize Your presence in the people we meet, the places we enter, and the ordinary moments we too easily overlook. Give us humble hearts to join the work You have already begun, trusting that Your grace is always one step ahead of our own. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).