NEW YEAR'S EVE MEDITATION

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On this morning on the brink of the new year, I am feeling unusually optimistic.  I am not by nature a very positive person.  Believe me, there are days when I can make the Grinch look like a big, green teddy bear.  Despite the fact that I truly believe I come from people for whom SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a dominant trait, I am feeling hopeful.

Hopeful -- despite the fact that I know that tomorrow will come with all the problems of today.

Hopeful -- despite the sure knowledge that a new year will not act like some sort of mystical band-aid that will cover all the ills and troubles of the world.

Hopeful because I firmly believe that in a broken creation, life sucks, and there is Jesus -- God-with-us, God's consolation in the midst of the desolation of human lives.  Jesus, who sparks the imagination of God can and will do, and from that spark, comes my hope.

After the time of Isaiah and his prophesies of the birth of Christ and the return of the Jews from captivity, the people of Israel were conquored twice more, first by the Greeks who restricted the practice of their faith and desecrated the Temple, and then by the Romans who ruled most of the known world by the time Jesus was born.  Even in those dark times, the miracle that Hanukkah celebrates is a reminder that God had not abandoned them but was still at work amid them to bring about the fulfillment of His promises.

In the darkest of times, when it is hard to see God anywhere in the collosal mess of human actions, is when we stand on not what we feel but rather on what we know of God and what He has done through human history.  And that is, working quietly in the background of desolation, according to His timing, He brings hope and consolation to broken hearts and lives.

As God sent His Son into the world to a people living and darkness, I believe that God continues to sent His grace into the world today.  While things look particularly bleak right now, I know that I know that I know that the light of that grace that we experience through Jesus Christ cannot be overcome by the darkness.

So from the family in the parsonage by the mighty Mississippi, we wish you a blessed New Year filled with imagination and hope.





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