New Year’s Resolution Worth Making (an eye opener)
Saturday 6 January 2024
Finding Our Way Through the Brambles of Life,
Alone?
Psalm 25:12
Who are they that fear the Lord? He will teach them the way that they should choose.
Matthew 2:12
And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
…
Words of Grace For Today
Going a different way.
I suppose New Year’s resolutions are the imagination and statement that one will go a different direction going forward.
The three wise men, being warned in a dream, take a different route on their return home after presenting gifts to the child Jesus.
How many times are we going to try to ‘go it a different way’, forward or back, and it will be merely another futile attempt, a classic demonstration that we are not quite in complete control of our lives, not even when we make choices to become better people.
Thank God,
like the dreams sent to the three wise men, like the Law given to the people new to the Wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, like the Prophets sent to guide the nation Israel and it’s people overrun by more powerful neighbours, like the science that can tell us the consequences of our actions (like burning fossil fuels in the extreme we have and still do, and seemingly cannot stop doing),
God does send us notice and guidance.
But that is never enough.
We need to be convinced that 1. God will forgive us our failures (or else we are frozen by guilt past, present and especially future), 2. God will renew our spirits so that we can possibly do something right and good, and 3. God will help those, who we harm and those of us who are harmed by others, to heal.
A New Year’s Resolution worth making each year:
We will pray: God help us to accept forgiveness and boldly go out to do your work in this precious creation, and help us all heal from all the harm we’ve done and is done to us.
And then go boldly into the days’ ‘breach’, so to speak, bringing God’s grace to bear on others’ lives.