The fresh page

I remember it well.

I was probably ten years old and I had opened a new math notebook. There in front of me was a fresh, clean page. Not a scuff or a smudge. No scribbles or bent numbers. Just the perfection of crisp blue lines on its pale white background.

It was a thing of beauty as I broke it open and laid it beside its predecessor: a battered, dog-eared veteran. But it was not the mud stains and torn pages that bothered me about the old book. No, its problem was far deeper.

That old book was full of pages in which assignments had gone wrong. In some the rows of addition and subtraction, of multiplication and division, had become misshapen and tangled. On others, the blotches and scars of miscalculation had progressed from the faint traces of a carefully erased numeral to the darkened grey stains of multiple failures. Often these simply collapsed into frustrated scribbles.

Other pages began in fine form only to end in vacant spaces filled with doodled trees and childish monsters. By the end of the notebook the moments of order and pride became fewer and fewer and finally gave way to a scrawling complacency.

And so I began a new page, in a new book. Carefully, I marked the date in the right corner of the page, the numbers of the assignment on the left side. And using as careful a script as time allowed, I began the series of math problems assigned for that hour.

The memory and joy of that notebook still comes back to me. In the age of Palm Pilots and laptop computers, it is still a large spiral notebook that sits on my desk or travels with me to meetings. In it, all my phone numbers, notes, appointments and ideas find their first draft.

Other than a date notation, this book makes no particular attempt at organization. It becomes dog-eared even more rapidly than the school notebooks of my youth. But when I first break open a new notebook I mark the first date as carefully as I did when I was ten and the notations of the first few pages are done in methodical though barely legible script.

It would be easy to be cynical with this small pleasure. For reasons that baffle me, my handwriting seems to have deteriorated since I was young. And I’ve never been able to complete a single notebook in the neat asymmetrical patterns that brainy girls seem to produce effortlessly. I’ve learned to survive and even occasionally thrive in a chaotic world – so why not just bury that childlike joy with its clean white page at the beginning of a new notebook?

Isn’t that sentiment exactly what the most shallow of new resolutions are made of? Having seen nearly 50 years go by and having watched more than a few of them turn dog-eared and messy, why not just move past this childhood fascination with the fresh page? Isn’t it time to move on and grow up?

The answer is both yes and no.

Yes, because a recommitment to an ordered life needs to start when it starts, even if it’s in the middle of a mess. There is no inherent magic in a fresh page or a New Year or September in the life of a church, when programs are launched again.

Yes, because it will not be long before the pages of new resolutions or the enthusiasm of new programs will be stained with smudges. In life, smudges happen.

But there is another answer as well. Without the image of the new page or a new year, without even the intentions of an ordered life, chaos has no restraint. It may happen slowly but, unrestrained, chaos always prevails. Most of us have closets that show its power. We need clean new pages. They play a pragmatic role in life.

Clean pages, however, have a value far deeper than simple pragmatism. They also illustrate the biblical principle of the divine gift of new beginnings. The biblical people of God took great joy in this principle, often in times of deep tragedy. The heartbroken prophet Jeremiah expressed it most poignantly: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22–23).

After many years of smudged beginnings, it is tempting to dismiss the childhood joy of a clean page. To do so however, is to turn one’s back on a gift God has given to all humanity.

James Toews is pastor of Neighbourhood Church, Nanaimo, B.C. This article is adapted from one previously published in Nanaimo Daily News.