January 2018 What’s so special about 2018?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Well everyone we have entered a new year.  A new year by the Gregorian calendar anyway.   I am not Jewish but I do appreciate the symbolism of numbers.  The Jewish calendar started September 20 (2017) with the date being 5778.  There is no b.c. or a.d. but bringing these two dates together, 5778 and 2018 I want to give you a glimpse of how prophetic they are.  The Jewish year 5778 is broken down as 5 = grace, 7, 7 is the double anoiting, 8 is new beginnings.  The study of 5778 is powerful and I encourage you to do some research.  I could easily get distracted with how powerful the prophecy is but that is for another time.   With the start of 2018 I want to focus on 8, the number of new beginnings.

Melding these two numbers together I strongly feel it is my new beginning.  Lord knows I need grace for how many times I have started a writing project only to be distracted until despair sets in that I will never write anything.  But the fire still smolders and here I am again.  I love the 5 for grace.  Surely God’s grace has carried me through each passing year that has felt like a failure.  Yet as I reflect the many years of my life I realize God has spoken a great truth every year.  How odd it seems that a whole year must pass to gain a life-changing truth.  God is truly a redeemer of time and so it is that somehow the time I feel I have lost will actually produce a great multiplying of truths to feed the souls I know He called me to.

I have a serious addiction.  Not one I need to be delivered from.  No, one I need to spread.  It is LIMERICKS.  If you are not familiar with these short rhymes let me tell you they can be fun, sad, and profound all at the same time.  It may have been 3rd or 4th grade when I first learned of them.  I have written many over the years but in the last 3 years I began to really write them in notebooks and journals and random pieces of paper.  The passion grew and I felt impressed to write a book of them.  What happened was …me.  Or more so the parts of me that fell victim to believing those thoughts that always came along whenever I got close to actually doing something.  So now I have notebooks, journals, papers, random scraps of papers that have inspirational limericks on them.  Everywhere!  Oh the lying tormentor of my soul succeeded in laying waste to my efforts.  But the lover of my soul has comforted me with grace and a double portion anointing to begin again.   He has once again reminded me that when I trust Him I still must get up and do the work.   How can the piece of paper with your rhyme on it Paula find its proper reader stuffed in a drawer somewhere or lying by your nightstand? I must get up and begin.  Heck the year already started!!

As 2018 is already upon us I must get up and do the work.  Work while it is still day for the night comes quickly.

This is the year I write a limerick a day.   Some will be silly, others sad and still others that will need some pondering.  My hope is they speak to you life changing truths by the simple task of rhyming. Here my first for 2018 but the rest will be for everyday, any year.

There once was a year declared 2018,

Only the declarers saw what was seen.

Eight means new beginnings,

Declarers saw their winnings.

For they declared what they saw before it was seen.