The Gift of a New Year…
I am not so certain that we readily enter into a new year with our focus on the freshness or the hope of those brand-new beginnings that smolder deep in our hearts. I tend to believe that we let our glance rest a little too long on all those areas of our lives where we feel we have failed or not given our best. Why else would we still make resolutions based on what has gone before? We look into the past year and feel guilty or discouraged when we realize that we are still struggling with our failures and our weaknesses, those age-old shadows that we seem to overcome, only to discover that they still pursue us relentlessly deep inside.
It can be beneficial to glance backward over the past year if we do not stay there and center on our incompleteness. As long as we do not base all our vision of the new year on that backward glance, we can learn from what we see. But then we must move on. January is such a good time to deliberately set our steps forward, to begin again, to give ourselves over to the promises of the future. January invites us to look, really look, at our life’s journey and rejoice over the gift of another year given to us. The perception of life that enables us to walk into a new year with this hope and confidence is the perception that we can begin anew, that we are constantly being offered fresh beginnings by our God.
It is this “God of freshness” who encourages our journey. If we are to walk into the new year hopefully, we need to look at God as well as at ourselves. When we look to the Scriptures, we learn how much God desires new beginnings for us. This is a constant theme that runs through the sacred Word. We hear again and again that God refreshes, renews, heals, blesses, makes whole, cleanses what has become mired, clears what has become blurred, restores what has died, recovers what has gone astray. Yahweh speaks in Isaiah, telling us:
“Come now, let us talk this over…Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Is 1:18).
This is God’s “Happy New Year” to us!
May we all open our lives to the breath of His bless and the glance of Christ’s grace and so be made whole and truly NEW every day!
Rev. Katherine Rood
Christ Lutheran Church
