I often feel worried when I am trying to come up with a “new” idea for my Christian Daily Thought, that the topic I've landed is one that I've done before. In fact, I'm pretty sure this isn't even the first time that I've written about my struggles with worrying that I'm repeating myself. I'm not even sure why I'm so averse to rehashing an old idea, especially since 99% of what I write can be boiled down to Love God and love your neighbor as yourself and Christ, the Savior of the world, is the only way to find peace in this life and eternal life in the world to come. I am trying to embrace the idea that it is OK for me to revisit old topics, not just in my daily spiritual thoughts but in life in general. It's OK if today I'm mostly grateful for the same things I was grateful for yesterday. It's OK if I say pretty much the same thing when bearing my testimony this month as I did when I bore my testimony last month. It's OK if I'm reading the Book of Mormon again for the thirtieth time. Mostly, it's OK because even as we do these seemingly identical tasks over and over, they are not, in fact, exactly the same. The philosophers say that you can't cross the same river twice, because each time you cross the river, it's made up of a different collection of water molecules and microorganisms and darting minnows and stones that have been worn just a little more smooth than the last time. And I am in a different place today - emotionally, mentally, spiritually - than I was the last time that I used that same “you can't cross the same river twice” metaphor. And I'll be in a different place with a different collection of thoughts and ideas and associations the next time I feel the need to bring up this same metaphor again. It is good that I have this drive to try and find new things to say. It's part of what has helped me to keep this whole daily spiritual thought thing going as long as it has. But it's also OK for me to write about an idea that seems fresh and new or at least important or deeply moving right now, and yet, it is something that I've written about more than once in the past. Even if I'm inadvertently plagiarizing my past self word for word, maybe this time there will be someone reading it who missed it the first time, or if they did read it the first time, maybe this time it resonates differently. Every moment is different from the last. Sometimes the differences are tiny and sometimes they are huge. We don't need to feel stifled or stalled or stuck just because we are doing something that seems exactly identical to what we've done a hundred times before. Every time we decide to do it again, we are a different person living in a different world from the last time we did it. When Christ invites us to be born again, He is inviting us to embrace the reality that the world has changed and so have we so we are not chained down by what has happened in the past but everything can be brand new. There is a phrase associated with the showman PT Barnum, “There's a sucker born every minute.” While the Savior would never consider any of God's children in such derogatory terms, He would in fact be delighted if we were born every minute. He invites us to be like a child because everything is new and exciting and interesting to a child. I hope that we can all choose as often as we can to be born again every single minute of our lives.
