And since I Blogged about Christmas, Might as Well Blog about the New Year...

I can remember being in elementary school, watching the teacher at the front of the room remove the “1989,” carefully printed in large block letters in black marker on green construction paper.  That piece of paper fluttered into the wastebasket as my teacher replaced it with “1990.”  She’d also exchanged the name of the month, swapping out “December” for “January.”  She didn’t toss away the name of the month, though.

“The months come again,” she explained, I guess filing “December” away for next year.  “But the years never do.”

I was seven at the time, and as I stared at the trashcan where 1989 had been deposited, I can still remember the sense of sadness I felt as I realized that the year was over, and unlike the passing month, it would never return.  It was gone and finished, never to be displayed in our classroom again.

It was a profound realization.  We don’t get the years back.

I’m not sure what kind of a weird kid I was, that I let that image of the final year of the eighties in the trashcan stay with me all of this time.  On that day, I actually mourned the passing of a year in a way that could be considered similar to that with which adults and older children might grapple with death (a circumstance that fortunately had not yet touched my young life).

But it seems to me now that my fixation on what was lost and over back then has stayed with me all these years later, reminding me that time only moves forward, that it stops for none of us, that you can look back, but never go back.

And while I still think there is a certain sadness in that, I choose to spend more of my time these days being grateful for the months that I know will come round again, rather than dwelling on the years in the past.

True, I won’t be here for all of them—the future summers that I love to spend lying on the beach, the impending winters that bring the excitement of possible snow fall, the springs that promise beauty in blooms and new beginnings.

But the times will keep coming, even after I’m gone.  There is a season for everything.  Ecclesiastes 3:1 reads, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.”  3:4-7 continue, “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak.”

May the coming year bring you more laughter than weeping, more dancing than mourning, more searching, mending, and embracing than their alternatives.  But if the new year contains more of the less desirable aspects of life for you and yours, may God grant you wisdom and understanding as you go through whatever seasons 2019 holds for you.

Charles Dickens began one of his great works with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”  While this is one of the most renowned beginnings in all of literature, my response has always been:  Well, yeah.  But when wasn’t it?

While there are very real highs and lows likely waiting around the corner for you and me, many of them beyond our control, we also hold a great responsibility in our own lives to choose how we respond to the good and the bad, the thrilling and the devastating, the little moments, both precious and mundane.

Nearly three thousand years ago, the author of Ecclesiastes, most likely King Solomon, came to a similar realization.  In Chapter Five, the book reads, “it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot.  Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God” (18-19).

So while your labor may be toilsome or some of your days tedious, whatever your struggles, I pray that you find satisfaction in all that you have been given in the coming year.   Our days may seem like many, but the older we get, the faster they come.  Too often, in the end, it seems we were given too few.  So I pray that you make the ones you were given count, that you find satisfaction in the small stuff, that you choose to be thankful even when your natural inclination might lead you to feel otherwise.  I hope you find joy in all your blessings, big and small in 2019, and I hope you find more reasons to smile than to cry.

Love from my family to yours.

If God allows, we'll celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary this summer.  We've been privileged to experience some of life's greatest joys during these last few years, and we've also made our way through some really low valleys.  I don't know what 2019 has in store for us, but when I close my eyes and remember this moment, I am reminded that God has been so, so good to us, and that the same God who gave us each other was there through the dark times, too.