Fresh Isn’t First
Fresh starts sound wonderful.
Fresh air.
Fresh sheets.
Fresh bread.
Fresh flowers.
Fresh coffee.
Fresh paint.
Fresh haircuts.
Fresh clothes.
Even the word itself feels clean.
Hopeful.
Like possibility.
But lately I’ve been wondering…
Can something really be fresh if we never deal with what came before it?
When I was in middle school, Bath & Body Works’ Plumeria was everywhere.
Everyone had it.
The lotion.
The body spray.
The perfume.
To this day, I can’t smell Plumeria without immediately thinking of the girls’ locker room after P.E.
It wasn’t Plumeria’s fault.
It was ours.
A bunch of fourteen-year-old girls had somehow convinced ourselves that enough body spray could replace a shower.
It couldn’t.
We’d spray it over sweat, throw our uniforms back on, and head to our next class feeling surprisingly confident.
The locker room smelled like body odor…
…and Plumeria.
What we actually needed wasn’t another layer of fragrance.
We needed to wash.
The body spray wasn’t bad.
It was simply out of order.
I’ve realized I do the same thing in life.
When something feels broken, my instinct is often to reach for something new.
A new routine.
A new relationship.
A new goal.
A new project.
A new version of myself.
Fresh.
Fresh.
Fresh.
As though something new can somehow cover what still needs healing.
But fresh doesn’t repair what is broken.
It only sits on top of it.
Eventually, the old finds its way through.
I’ve learned that healing works differently.
Repair comes before renewal.
Not because God wants us to stay stuck in the past.
Because He loves us too much to let us build something beautiful on top of something that’s quietly falling apart.
The truth is…
I didn’t choose my last fresh start.
Life handed it to me.
And if I’m honest, I walked into it carrying yesterday’s dirt.
Grief.
Fear.
Confusion.
Regret.
The strange thing about fresh starts is that they don’t automatically make us feel fresh.
Sometimes we arrive exhausted.
Sometimes we’re still carrying the smell of the life we just left.
I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to perfume wounds that really needed washing.
Trying to move forward before I’d finished grieving.
Trying to become someone new before understanding who I used to be.
Trying to decorate rooms that still needed repairing.
The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending everything is fine.
I’ve learned that healing isn’t glamorous.
It’s ordinary.
It’s showing up again tomorrow.
It’s telling the truth.
It’s apologizing.
It’s forgiving.
It’s sitting with uncomfortable emotions instead of covering them with busyness.
It’s taking another shower when life gets messy again.
Because life does get messy again.
Every day, really.
Fresh isn’t something we achieve once.
It’s something we practice.
We get dirty.
We clean up.
We begin again.
Over and over.
Maybe that’s what grace has been all along.
Not pretending yesterday didn’t happen.
Not covering its smell.
Simply washing it away…
One ordinary day at a time.
