There is both a scientific and a spiritual way to look at endings and beginnings. First let’s look at the scientific side of endings. Many of the endings in our lives are due to the planet Earth on which we reside. Every 24 hours, Earth’s rotation causes the sun to set and our day to end. Because of that characteristic of our planet, man has developed a “circadian rhythm”. When it gets dark, we feel sleepy. If we have a good night’s sleep, we awake refreshed. The end of the previous day was a good ending because it allowed us to sleep. We are now at our best to begin the new day. The old you becomes a new you. The planet Earth also revolves around the sun. But because the axis of the Earth is tilted, as we revolve around the sun, we have different seasons. Our calendars may tell us the end of the year is December 31, but the end of the year that plants and animals recognize is when winter arrives. Endings are programmed into our biology as well. As we enter our early teenage years, our bodies start to produce more hormones than they did before – and childhood ends. Your death is also programmed into your body. Eventually the failure of one of your bodily systems will cause your body to cease its function. In a process we call “eternal progress”, we should expect multiple endings and beginnings. We are supposed to learn to move on again and again and yet again. The numerous cycles of endings and new beginnings on earth give me hope for a new beginning after death. It seems logical that, with my death, I will simply begin a new phase of my eternal life. In summary, congratulations on reaching the end of 2020. Lets’ hope that 2021 will be a better year for everyone.
S1E13 – Endings and Beginnings – Happy New Year
This is the podcast Science and Scriptures Season 1, Episode 13, or “Endings and Beginnings – Happy New Year”
Hello this is your host Scott Frazer and welcome to another episode of Science and Scriptures.
We are approaching the end of another year. In the past I have always found the end of the year to be a depressing time. I look back at my year, trying to think of what I did with all that time. What did I accomplish? Is my life better now than it was 365 days ago?
There is both a scientific and a spiritual way to look at endings and beginnings. First let’s look at the scientific side of endings.
Many of our endings in our lives are due to the planet Earth on which we reside. First, Earth is rotating on its axis at rather a brisk pace. Every 24 hours, that rotation causes the sun to set and our day to end. Because of that characteristic of our planet, over the course of our evolution, man has developed a “circadian rhythm”. This rhythm is a natural, internal process that regulates our sleep-wake cycle. When it gets dark, we get sleepy. Plants, insects, animals, and even bacteria also have a circadian clock built into their systems. Newborns are supposed to follow a circadian rhythm as well, though many new parents have evidence to prove otherwise.
When we sleep, our bodies are able to rest. Our muscles can finally stop flexing. They can flush themselves of lactic acid and prepare themselves for the next day. Our brains have a chance to file into memory the experiences we want to remember. If we have a good night’s sleep, we awake refreshed. The end of the previous day was a good ending, because it allowed us to sleep. We are now at our best to begin the new day. The old you has become a new you.
Besides rotating on its axis, the planet Earth also revolves around the sun. Every 365.25 days the earth completes the trip around the sun that it started the year before. But because the axis of the Earth is tilted, as we revolve around the sun, we have different seasons. When the North Pole is pointed in the direction of the sun, we have summer. As the North Pole points at right angles to the sun, we have autumn or fall. As the North Pole points away from the sun, we move into winter. This slight shift in our distance from the sun has a dramatic effect on our weather. Days get shorter, the warmth of the more distant sun diminishes, and temperatures drop. Our calendars tell us the end of the year is December 31, but the end of the year that plants and animals recognize is when winter arrives. Plants go into a dormancy period and stop growing. Recognizing the need to conserve energy before their sleep, trees and bushes cut off nourishment to their leaves. These fall leaves, often beautiful colors of yellow, orange, and red, die and fall to the ground to become mulch for future generations of plants . Birds migrate. Squirrels store food in preparation for the long winter. Bears and other animals get fat to get ready for hibernation. The year is ending, and our side of the earth settles in for a three-month long winter sleep.
But then spring arrives. Temperatures climb and spring rains fall, washing away the snow. The fiscal year for plants and animals begins. Feeling rested and revitalized from the long winter’s nap, plants start to grow again. Animals come out of their dens and hollows. The estrous cycles of most animals are timed to bear their young in the spring. Winter signaled an end of the year, but that ending permitted a new beginning in the spring.
Endings are programmed into our biology as well. As children, we are carefree and learning about the world. Then, as we enter our early teenage years, our bodies start to produce more hormones than they did before – and childhood ends. Those hormones prepare us to enter adulthood and to bear children of our own. Though we may miss it, the ending of childhood opens up new worlds of opportunity and learning.
Then as we enter middle age, our bodies slow their production of the hormones that made us adults. Women enter menopause. In men, this reduction in hormones is called “andropause”. The time period that we can bear children has ended. We enter a new phase in our lives that can be much more restful and, hopefully, pleasant.
The ultimate ending of Earth life is also programmed into your body. Your body ages and cannot keep up with the ravages of time. Bones get weak, our brains shrink, our teeth weaken. In fact every system in your body starts to break down. Eventually one of those failures (or a combination of several) will cause your body to cease its function.
Our society introduces many endings into our lives as well. When you marry, your single life comes to an end. The beginning of married life requires significant adjustments, so the first year or two of marriage, as everyone knows, can be difficult. But, if you found the right spouse for yourself, the joys of marriage make the end of single life a great tradeoff.
When you graduate high school or college, your life as a student ends. You get a real job. Life changes but you get richer – both from new experiences and, hopefully, monetarily.
I’ve changed jobs a number of times in my life. Each time the change ended my job (which was a good ending) and ended our close association with friends and neighbors (not such a good ending). But we have to accept all aspects of the endings in our lives, and appreciate the new beginnings.
The Lord recognizes the importance of the endings and beginnings in our lives. Multiple times in the Scriptures, He states,
“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”
“I am Alpha and Omega” only makes sense if you know that Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and Omega is the last.In this short verse from Revelations 23, the Lord states three time that his is the beginning and the end. In truth, if you look at the major endings and beginnings of our eternal lives – the end of our preexistence and the beginning of earth life, the end of the Mosaic Law and the beginning of the Law of the Gospel, the end of the earth and the beginning of the Millennium – Jesus Christ was or will be there.
In Doctrine and Covenants Section 29, the Lord tells us about another ending – this one to occur after the Millennium.
“And again, verily, verily, I say unto you that when the thousand years are ended, and men again begin to deny their God, then will I spare the earth but for a little season; And the end shall come, and the heaven and the earth shall be consumed and pass away, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth.
For all old things shall pass away, and all things shall become new, even the heaven and the earth, and all the fulness thereof, both men and beasts, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea;
And not one hair, neither mote, shall be lost, for it is the workmanship of mine hand.”
“Old things shall pass away, and all things shall become new.” It is a pattern that repeats itself over and over again in our eternal lives.
On a side note, I believe life is meant to teach us to accept and adapt to endings and new beginnings. Change prevents you from getting bored with life. Any stage in life can be wonderful – until it starts getting monotonous, predictable, and even tiresome. You stop looking forward to new days because they are not really new at all. Life provides us change to help us to learn new things – a drive that we all have.
We need change in our lives. When my youngest son was a senior in high school, he was still acting out the angry teenager role. He was bored and felt trapped in his own home. I pulled him aside one day and pointed out to him that he only had a few months of high school left. Then he would go to college and his entire life would change. He would leave family and friends behind. His whole life would be turned upside down. The discussion helped and my son seemed to be more content. He tried harder to appreciate the last days of living at home with his family and friends. Just the promise of change and a defined date when it would happen was enough to change my son’s attitude.
In a process we call “eternal progress”, we should expect multiple endings and beginnings. We are supposed to learn to move on again and again and yet again. I have observed that people who struggle to move on to the next phase of their lives struggle to feel comfortable in the phase they have been for too long. For example, some people have a hard time leaving high school. Other people have a hard time leaving single life and committing to marriage. Others have a hard time committing to having children. Even accepting the fact that a job is no longer working out for you and should be ended can be a very scary change to pursue. If you are feeling that the world is moving on without you, maybe there is a natural ending in your life that you aren’t recognizing or accepting.
In the early part of 2020, COVID-19 forced a number of endings on us. I will never forgive the coronavirus for that. Social gatherings ended. Church meetings ended. The normal school year ended and my wife’s career as a teacher ended. Dates to a restaurant and a movie ended. Long awaited travel and special events were cancelled. Significant family and church gatherings that had once created joy in our lives ended as well. The virus ended very necessary social interactions that people need to find happiness in life. It even pretty much ended handshakes, a social interaction I miss very much actually.
We have a new beginning of life that includes facemasks, social distancing, and half-filled restaurants and chapels. We continue to hope for a vaccine that will allow us to return to our lives that we knew before. We have been promised it will arrive soon. An ending to the COVID restrictions seems imminent, an ending that would be welcome by all.
So, now we are approaching the end of the year 2020. It has been a tough year by any account. I read a declaration by one person who was going to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, not to welcome the New Year of 2021, but to make sure that 2020 leaves.
But unfortunately… the end of 2020 will not mean the end of COVID restrictions. Like many problems that follow us from year to year, COVID is going to stay around a while longer. A hard fact to accept is that we don’t control most of the endings in our lives. Childhood ends, college ends, having children in your home ends. We need to realize that fact, so that we can better appreciate and burn into our memories of the soon-to-end phases of our lives. It is good if you miss and reminisce about past stages in life. It means you enjoyed the experiences and grew from them as a person. The time was well spent. But those chapters in your life always close, despite your sincere desires. The year 2020 is ending at midnight on Dec. 31. There is nothing we can do but say goodbye to it.
The good news is that you CAN control the beginnings of your life. January 1st can be the time that you choose to begin to accept the COVID restrictions. If you are angry at having to wear facemasks into stores and other public places, you can choose to stop being angry at a situation you cannot control. If you are angry with the “other” political party (you know, the one that you don’t support), you can stop being irritated with them too.
When dealing with endings and beginnings, we should remember one of my favorite reminders on how to live a joyful life. The Serenity prayer begins as follows:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
We must ‘live one day at a time’ and ‘enjoy one moment at a time’ because those days and moments will end soon.This is a great prayer to take into 2021. With lots of free time on their hands, many people spent the past year grousing about things that they could not change, including myself by the way. But such anger is counterproductive. A good New Year’s resolution might be to remember the Serenity prayer each morning and follow its counsel the rest of the day.
The only things you can fully expect to change with the new year are your attitudes. We make fun of New Year’s resolutions because they are so easily broken. Breaking resolutions is a reflection of the fact that change is hard. Change involves the ending of a poor behavior and the beginning of a better one. We also call this change… repentance. In repentance, we end an undesirable characteristic of our lives because it is not allowing us to be the best person we can be. We begin to take on new attitudes and practices to get closer to that best person. It’s time to reverse the sour moods that COVID and a particularly divisive political season caused. For many of us, it’s time to repent of 2020 and vow to make 2021 a better year.
Death and Resurrection
The numerous cycles of endings and new beginnings we find on earth give me hope for a new beginning after death.
The first phase of life we knew about was the Preexistence. God the Father knew that His children needed to progress without Him looking over their shoulder, so He created the Earth and sent us here. Preexistence ended and Earth Life began. As children and youth, we experienced dozens of different endings and beginnings. Every May, we ended a school grade, and in September we began the next. As adults we experience more endings and beginnings.Then we live through our own children’s progression from kindergarten to high school to college. At the same time, we watch the earth pass from season to season. There have been so many endings and beginnings in my earthly life – and I have learned from each chapter. It seems logical that, with my death, I will simply begin a new phase of my eternal life.
The Resurrection will certainly be a new beginning. I am really looking forward to a resurrected body, especially a new right ankle and a new lower back. I am looking forward to learning new things about our eternal existence and the rest of the universe. I have a lot of questions that I’ve been waiting to ask.
There will be other new beginnings as well, though we don’t know much about them. The word “afterlife” is not very specific, telling us only that it is… After Life on earth. But most assuredly, it will involve endings and new beginnings.Mortal life certainly does.
There will even be an ending to some of our endings. The scriptures mention the phrase “never-ending” several times. King Benjamin points out that we will reach a point when certain aspects of eternal life that become “never-ending”. From excerpts of Mosiah 2. we read
“Therefore if that man repenteth not, and remaineth and dieth an enemy to God, the demands of divine justice do awaken his immortal soul to a lively sense of his own guilt… And now I say unto you, that mercy hath no claim on that man; therefore his final doom is to endure a never-ending torment.”
OR
“…and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness.”
We will be there someday, but not quite yet. Generally, we fear change that we don’t understand – such as death, a move to a foreign country, or the 2nd Coming. But I believe that the normal motions of life will on earth will continue into the afterlife. With a life full of endings and beginnings that I have found so joyful, why should I believe it will be otherwise in the afterlife? I am looking forward to what that new life holds for me.
In summary, congratulations on reaching the end of 2020, a very difficult year for nearly everyone on earth. Have hope that 2021 will be a better year for the planet, but please know you cannot control that. You can have a determination and resolve that 2021 will be a better year for you personally. The New Year is a new beginning and can, just like awakening from a good night’s sleep, be a fresh start for you as well.
So, that is all that I have for you today. I hope you are preparing for a great New Year. The ending of an old year can be a time to reminisce, which can be good or bad. Reminiscing can be destructive if you dwell on the negatives. But reminiscing can help you discover what aspects of your life has made you the happiest and help you make valuable decisions. The endings of good moments were sad, but the beginnings they allow can be even more joyful. In the end, I have been far happier than I deserve.
I want to thank my listeners for having patience with my beginning attempts at hosting a podcast. I hope you have found the content entertaining and informative. Thank you for taking your time to listen. This is Scott Frazer of the podcast “Science and Scriptures”. Have a very happy beginning of the year 2021. Take care.