Begin Again: A 7-Day Devotional By Leeana TankersleySample

Twilight Comes Twice

When I was minutes out of graduate school and brand-newly twenty-four years old, I drove from West Virginia where I had been in school, down to Virginia to pick up my little brother from college, home to San Diego, and then I slept for an entire day. When I woke up, I found a book my mom left on my nightstand. A gift. 

Twilight Comes Twice. 

It’s a children’s book about dawn and dusk, a simple reminder that the sun goes down and the sun comes up. Every day. And twice, in between, we get the gift of these golden hours, these pockets of waking up and winding down.

No matter how beautiful and epic and glorious life is right now, the sun goes down. And no matter how ugly and rejecting and hurtful life is right now, the sun comes up. Something about this saved me then and saves me now. I was young and starting over geographically and professionally and relationally. But more than that, the very rhythm of creation was reminding me that it wasn’t all up to me. Something was going on that was beyond me, behind me, below me, beside me.

And I just needed to join it, fall into it, beginning again and again and again.

I could join or I could resist. But either way, the sun would set and the sun would rise—with or without me. I could try to outrun the sun with my superhuman striving. I could try to hide in the dark with my subhuman shame. But the invitation, then and now, was to join the rhythm of creation, which is to be what we were simply and profoundly created to be . . . human.

Human. In all its extraordinary everyday ordinary.

If I am failing, stuck, and paralyzed, I always have the opportunity to begin again. And if I am winning, elated, and propelled, I still must begin again. None of us is too far gone, in the same way that none of us has arrived. This is reorienting to the core.

Could you and I join the rhythm of twice-a-day twilight that reminds us there are gifts in both the light and dark—illumination and stillness? If you’re in the dark, you can begin again. And if you’re in the broad side of the light, you will still need to begin again. This is how we practice being human.

Twilight comes twice.

Whether we are in crisis or chaos or calm, hope or disappointment, burial or resurrection, ordinary or extraordinary, we can— because of the inexhaustible grace of God—begin again.

Write in your own words what it means to begin again, to accept the inexhaustible grace of God and find breath and rest in a brand new moment, every moment, every day. 

Click here  for Leeana's free 15-day devotional and Begin Again discussion guide!