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I always think this final weekend before the start of September has a kind of New Year’s Eve feel about it. Indeed, looking out of my study window at the parched grass trying to absorb the torrential rain this week, I imagine a lot of people were also thinking about returning to work or school, or simply getting back into the usual rhythm of things, after the long (and for many of us) hot summer. The French call it – La Rentrée meaning literally “a re-entry” or “a coming back” – and it’s much bigger across the Channel than our relatively tame supermarket Back to School campaigns. There are radio jingles, adverts and shop displays heralding its arrival, not just in schools and colleges but across most media platforms, and in commerce and public life. It represents a stepping up of the pace again and a return to what might be called normality. Of course, for pupils, parents & teachers the next few days will be a mixture of hope and apprehension. And a special thought — and prayer — for those starting school for the first time or beginning at a new school. It’s a momentous moment. For the majority though – the return to school is not a completely blank page: rather it’s an opportunity to build on, or improve, everything that’s gone before. The Christian faith has always taken new beginnings seriously. In Revelation, the final book of the Bible, God says, “Behold, I make all things new.”1[1] Note that God is not saying here that everything always has to start from scratch, but that everything already underway is to be renewed and refreshed. It’s an idea we find throughout the teaching of Jesus which overall is an invitation to begin again, and to see even familiar things with something of a child’s openness. Jesus describes it as new birth, like new wine needing new containers — suggesting that the new cannot always be contained by the old.2[2] A return, then, need not be a going backwards, but an opportunity to see afresh what’s already there. Perhaps most of us know that instinctively. We rarely get the chance to start life all over again, but we are given opportunities to begin again from where we are. In the days ahead, most of us won’t have a new classroom, timetable or textbook to grapple with. But perhaps the approach of September offers everyone something of a new beginning. We carry the past with us, but we need not be bound by it. And perhaps that is the real promise of every return: the chance, whatever our age, to begin again.