We like to attribute special significance to beginnings, like the start of a new year, the first day of school, or a first date. We do this because we are born to create, to make all things new. It’s in our spiritual DNA; it’s intrinsic to our being.

All creative processes have a beginning, a point of inception or conception. Typically speaking, the early phases of something new are largely invisible or unformed. Think blueprints for a construction project, a business plan for a new enterprise, or the fertilization of an egg. In the beginning, the idea is present in its essence—the spirit of the endeavor—but the form has yet to take shape.

Beginnings are often brimming with promise and expectation. There is excitement for what could be and anticipation for it to be. Beginnings are thrilling, even transcendent. They lift us out of the familiar and remind us of life’s intrinsic dynamism, plasticity, and originality.

You have a new beginning, starting right now. While reading this post you’ve probably felt an oscillation between the familiar and the unknown. You might say to yourself “I’ve heard or thought this before,” while also feeling “Something in what is being said feels different…fresh, and interesting.” Life is the oscillation from the known to the unknown.

Most people destroy new beginnings with prejudice. They overlook the newness of the beginnings before them due to inflexible, pre-formed judgments based on past experience, about something that is in reality, new. “Here we go again,” they say, with the underlying belief that there is nothing new under the sun and that they’ve seen it all before. Prejudices abort life’s most promising offspring.

Other people disrupt the process earlier on, prior to the birth of the new thing, during its gestation. They either grow impatient or they refuse to let the form take shape according to the invisible template, formed in spirit. The heaven, that is, the invisible, always precedes the earth, the visible.

People prone to this error jump in, as it is said, where angels fear to tread. They imagine what marriage would be like with the person across the table on the first date or they start researching kindergartens and colleges and guessing which position he or she will play on the soccer team, the moment the pregnancy is confirmed.

Effective stewardship of a creative cycle that is rooted in God’s plan requires patience, yes, but it also requires a willingness to act—to nourish, protect, and enfold—from conception to gestation to birth. There is an active abiding, a listening, and a fearlessness in action when the time is right for action. This is wisdom, the sense of the “fitness” of things.

As you conceive what lies ahead in this new year, consider the divine approach to the creative process: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…” If you truly listen, by taking a step back, inclining your heart and mind to God’s will as it comes to focus in you, God will initiates the process according to His will, His needs.

Don’t forget: He does so invisibly. The seed of creation, of the new beginning, comes to focus in your heart and mind invisibly at first, before it is made manifest. The heaven and the earth are imprinted in the chambers of your heart and the halls of your mind before any form appears. The heaven and the earth are created, yet “the earth [is] without form and void…”

Remember that in the beginning, “darkness” will be “upon the face of the deep.” You won’t see much, if anything at all, and that’s okay. This is how it is supposed to work. When the time is right you will “let there be light.”

Most new beginnings don’t tend to work out this way because man, endowed with free will, tends to manhandle the process. He eats of the forbidden fruit, that is, judges, jumps to conclusions, and arrogates the process of gestation, trying to bend the emergent form to his opinions, ideals, and desires.

Wise is he who remembers through the process: “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it…” The inner you, the unique and eternal Being that you are, is a Lord or a Lady, a noble citizen of the Kingdom of heaven. You are one among many.

That which you create with your outer capacities of body, mind, and heart and without reference to the invisible pattern of design (the “logos” or Word) at focus within you, is likely to fall prey to moths and rust. This is why the human experience has become a struggle against decay, and ultimately, death. The decay, or the experience of death as we know it for that matter, is not natural, but rather a result of man’s misuse of his creative capacities and of his free will.

The new beginnings before you are significant. They have meaning and relevance to the degree that they are conceived in love and truth. And you are a creator. You were made to be a womb for the things of heaven. You are designed to facilitate immaculate conception and mindful, heartfelt gestation. You are here for genesis.

You are here to let the invisible things of heaven find form and expression in the earth through your feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds.

So let it be!

Photo by Herbert Goetsch on Unsplash