Gearing up for the New Year

The year 2010 was a really tough year for our family.  Things like totaling a car became petty nuisances compared to the weightier things of life.  We attended three funerals that we did not expect going into the year.  We had some shocking medical bills.  We even had our house on the market for exactly 24 hours. But there were some awesome things as well.  There was an unexpected move in our lives as I became the Teaching Pastor at Birchwood Church. Our oldest started kindergarten.  We brought our fourth child into the world, a boy, now there are four sons, my poor wife. A new-to-me car, same year make and model but I liked the old one before someone decided to tackle it with their car at the corner of 39^th and Phelps, now a new-to-me car.  

Now as we sit just days from closing out this year, we are all forced to look over the past and think on the things we want to and the things we don’t. The more we resist, the more we seem to engage in this self-evaluation. The good decisions and the bad, the fun times and the not fun, the parties and the lonely moments nobody else knows about, the fights and the make-ups, all of them now go on the shelf in our memory waiting to be dusted off later and laughed about.  And isn’t it funny that we do always seem to laugh about them all.  The worse the memory, the better story it makes.

As we approach 2011, at a time when we all consider the vows we will make for the New Year, repenting to ourselves, our families and friends, and even to God, I hope the humor we find in the past points out some hidden aspect of God’s work in our lives.  Could it be that salvation is so wonderful, that the worse the memories, the more joy we will gain?  Can God be so powerful as even to redeem our past?  Can Joy really work its way backward through time.  I hope so.  I hope that this transition to a New Year brings you Joy and Hope and Blessings, but I hope even more that it brings you fondness for the way God has worked in your past, and is still working now.  Who knows how we will look back?

Happy New Year!