The Christian life is a life of restarts.
I read or heard something recently that put the lie to the old adage that God is the God of second chances. Now that I'm thinking about it, I believe it was in a sermon from Tullian Tchividjian. He said that to believe that God is the God of second chances is to believe that there is still something of our own effort that is at play in the Christian life. That somehow, God is judging us by our mess-ups, but thankfully, he gives us another chance. Tullian (or whoever it was) said that God is the God of one chance and a second Adam. That is, Adam had a shot, and he blew it. But Jesus is the second Adam, and he succeeds. Speaking in biblical terms (and Gospel terms), we are all going to either be judged by the first Adam and the second Adam. Jesus wasn't really a "second chance"; he came to fix the problem that occurred when God gave us a chance at all.
In any event, this is the Gospel: that because God's love for me is not dependent on me at all, I can continually repent and just start over. God's not waiting for me to mess up. He's not waiting for me to succeed. I already have succeeded because of Jesus. So whatever I do, whether I do it well or poorly, I do out of a genuine freedom that I've found because of God's love for me in Jesus.
I say all that for a couple reasons. First, because I read a blog just recently about how to start blogging, and the author said, "just start writing." Stop thinking about the design, what you are going to say, whatever. Just start writing. He's right that during my days of journaling, which I've mentioned before, when I was writing 1500+ words a day and did so for more than a year, I didn't ask myself each morning what I was going to write about. I just got up and started writing, and out it came. So, he said, most bloggers get caught up wondering what they are going to write about when most times, the solution is just to start writing. (I ought to add here that I'm hoping to go back and find a link to his "10 things I would tell myself if I restarted my blog" or whatever it was titled, but to do that right now would be to defeat the purpose of just starting to write...)
The hope by even stating that is to maybe get my head in gear to actually start writing again. Also–don't worry about the audience. That was sort of his advice, I think. Or another piece of it. I can't remember. If not, I think maybe he intended it to be. The point is that I'm not entirely sure that you could know who the audience is when you begin; also, you might find (as I often do) that you are so beholden to who is reading it and what they might think or not think or whatever, and thus create what psychologists/sociologists call the "invisible audience" that you don't actually write what you want to write or even think, but you write with this invisible audience constantly in mind. How many more people would write world and life-changing things down if they weren't concerned about what their invisible audience thought about it before it even got onto the paper?
Secondly, I was struck by this idea of consistent restarts as I was preparing a message for a youth retreat I'm leading in a couple of weeks. I was reading from the Gospel Centered Life curriculum, and it mentioned the two sides of the Christian life that we tend to default towards: either legalism, which is assuming that we can meet all the criteria of God's law (usually by bending the law to make our actions seem less bad), or license, which is the assumption that since we can't meet God's law, and yet he forgives us anyway, we may as well go on sinning. In either case, it's a failure to understand the Gospel. Again, the Gospel is that God loves me in Jesus Christ, and I find my identity in Him. Not through my good deeds (where I might, in some miraculous alignment of desire, will, and action actually succeed in meeting God's law) and not through my bad deeds (where I constantly believe that I am a failure because I can't attain God's law.) Instead, I am confident that since Jesus has fulfilled the law, I am perfectly covered by his righteousness and thus, I am now free to do God's law (freedom=free from guilt, shame, the burden of the thought of failure, freedom from the eternal consequences).
So there you have it. When you understand the Gospel, the Christian life becomes less about missed opportunity and failed chances and much more about just saying, let's try that again. Let's restart. The past can actually remain in the past. The future is wide open. Let's give it another go.