I’m privileged to entice you to sit back and enjoy a great post today by my guest-friend blogger, K. M. (Katie) Weiland, author of the new book Behold the Dawn. If you’d like to have your name put in the pool for the drawing of the book, just leave a comment at the end of the post. Here are Katie’s insights…

The dedication of my recently released medieval novel Behold the Dawn reads in part, “To my beloved Savior, who has given us a fresh beginning in each new day. May we always have the strength to reach out and grasp that perfect gift.”

When I began writing this novel five years ago, I had no idea how much the story would teach me about my own life and my walk with the Lord. Perhaps not so ironically, the theme of Behold the Dawn—that each new day holds the opportunity to redeem yesterday’s mistakes and begin afresh—was a lesson I faced on an almost hourly basis during the writing of this book.

When we are born anew into the Spirit, we are given a clean slate, a brand new life, cleansed of all our mistakes and sins, both deliberate and accidental. But as the years slip by, it’s so easy to forget the beauty of that snow-white gift in the face of our continuing blunders.

When we are saved by the blood of Christ, we are released from the weight of our own defiance and stupidity—but we aren’t transformed into perfect beings who will never again sully ourselves with a mistake. Speaking for myself, mistakes are an hourly occurrence.

When I pause at night before bed to say one last prayer and look back over my progress (or lack thereof) during the day, there is inevitably something I regret. Some thoughtless word, some deliberate act of selfishness, some weakness in the face of temptation. I look at what I have to offer my Lord at the end of my day, and I am ashamed at its tarnished paltriness. Heartsick that, once again, I failed to do better, I hand one more day over to Him and fall into bed.

And what do I get in exchange for my pitiful little offering? I get the indescribable gift of a New Day.

In the 1985 movie adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, Anne Shirley (Megan Follows) comments, “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” Is there not an indescribable wonder in that? When I began writing Behold the Dawn, I knew I would be telling a story of redemption. I knew I wanted to tell the story of the world-weary knight Marcus Annan, who had spent most of his life broken beneath the weight of both the mistakes in his past and those continuing in his present.

What I didn’t know was that this story would necessarily lead me to articulate the beautiful truth that to have our lives redeemed by our submission to the Lord means that every single one of our days must also be redeemed.

We aren’t just given one shot at starting over. We’re given the endless gift of a million dawns, a million new days, a million chances to put the past behind us and begin anew. Even with the power of Christ in our lives, we will never live in perfection this side of eternity. But we can gladly relinquish the burden of each day’s mistakes. We can surrender them, throw them into the wastebasket like so many crumpled pieces of paper, and try again tomorrow.

My heart overflows with the joy of that knowledge, and I am so grateful and humbled that the Lord let me share this beautiful truth in my fiction. Although my representation of such an immense topic as redemption and grace must necessarily be flawed, I hope readers will be able to see past the dross and take away a few flakes of the gold at the story’s heart.

And perhaps Marcus Annan and company will leave their impact on their lives, as they most definitely have on mine.

I hope you’ve been blessed by my friend Katie’s post. If you’d like to check out her website, you’ll find her at Wordplay or at AuthorCulture.

If you’d like to purchase her book, here’s the link to Amazon.