Happy New Year! It is a wonderful greeting, not only for the happy wish, but for that great word, new. New and waiting. The year waits for our scribbling and scratching to make it our own. The year waits with a clean start. We will not be the cartoon baby in diapers and top hat, for we are still ourselves, and that is not bad. God has given us gifts to use and burnish and use again. We are gifts to the new year.
But when we look over the precipice into the new year, we are glued to the spot. We don’t want to go there. We want to go back 10 years and begin at that spot. This is not our new; it is trackless. We want to walk familiar paths.
God calls us, “Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new. God has done it all” (2 Corinthians 5:17). We are as new as the new year. Walk in the new paths God has sketched for the new person God has made.
This message is excerpted from “Happy New Year” by Marj Leegard from the December 13, 2015, blog of the Women of the ELCA. Today is New Year’s Eve.
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