We end and begin our years with three “happy” holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. While it’s easy to connect Thanksgiving and Christmas to God, New Year’s often gets dismissed as a purely “human” thing. I beg to differ.
As we approach the New Year, we generally do two things: reflect on the year past and make positive plans for the year to come.
The process of mulling over the year ending begins for me when I write my Christmas cards. If I’m sharing news with friends, I have to evaluate what was important out of all the year’s events. It becomes a period of taking stock of where things are in my life: How is my family? What are my blessings and trials? What have I accomplished – or not – that I had hoped to do? I notice my friends do the same sort of thing – bringing me up-to-date on what is happening in their lives. The report varies: some years are great and others we’re happy to leave behind.
We do this reflection as a society as well. The media air the “Year in Review” and the “Year’s Best” of everything: sports, movies, news stories, and music. At the very least this musing over the waning year can be interesting, but more than that, I think it’s good for us.
New Year’s encourages us to think about ourselves – not in a selfish way, but so that we know ourselves better. Sifting through the good and bad of the immediate past prepares us to tackle the future. It is holy work. The future joy that God holds for us is like a set of clothes we need to grow into.
Paul tells us that we become a new creation when we open ourselves to Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). As we begin 2016, let us resolve to use this newly gained self-knowledge to seek out God’s path for us in the year that beckons.
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