On Sunday we celebrated the lunar New Year with my wife’s family. It’s an annual event: hanging around with extended family, nourishing our tree of relationships through conversations and a days’ end feast. I talked for a while with my wife’s brother-in-law about how he’s helped to start the first school-based healthcare clinic with dental services in northern California (http://www.news10.net/news/story.aspx?storyid=71604). Why did he do it? Because God gave him a second chance at life.
A year and a half ago he fell off a ladder in his garage and his wife found him unconscious in a pool of blood. To look at him today you’d never know that he went through several hours of surgery and has enough titanium in his skull to build a small mountain bike. He’s retired from his dental practice but puts in two mornings a week at the school clinic so that under-served kids from economically disadvantaged homes can focus on their studies without also contending with dental pain. (He’s still trying to recruit enough dentists to help so that each dentist only needs to put in 1 morning a month.)
As the great theologian James Cameron says in the movie “Avatar”, everyone is meant to be born twice. God wants to give all of us a second chance at life (see John 3:1-5). For those of us who have been born again, what are we doing to be a source of life to others? Whether you celebrated the New Year on Jan. 1 or Feb. 14 (or both), that’s a New Year’s resolution worth working on.
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