Happy new year!

It’s nearly mid-month but we’re still saying “Happy New Year” to those we encounter for the first time in 2015. It’s 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 was adapted from “All Things Made New” by Marj Leegard that appeared in the January/February 2002 issue of Lutheran Woman Today (now Gather) magazine.