BY BRUCE GREEN
OPINION —
I hope the past year has gone well for you and that the new one will be even better. I think New Year’s Day is a great holiday. It tends to get the short end of the attention stick because it comes right after Christmas and is usually overshadowed by it. The truth is, New Year’s Day is regarded by most of us as part of the Christmas holiday package (kind of like buying one holiday and getting the other one for free).
However, I think New Year’s Day is special and should be viewed that way for a few reasons.
First, it’s an accomplishment. Why do people celebrate the new year? One reason would be that the ringing in of a new year means that we have made it through and to another year. We should all be celebrative of this of course, but I think those who are elderly or are living with a serious illness have the inside track on the rest of us in terms of understanding and appreciating how simply making it to the next year is an accomplishment and a cause for celebration. We could learn from them.
But there’s another reason why people celebrate the new year. It has to do with the hope and promise represented by a new year. Before us is a year which, like anything else new, is unstained by failure and untouched by disappointment. Most of us long for a future that is better than our past and if nothing else, we have it for a few moments each year when we mentally throw away the old calendar and replace it with one that is clean of failures, bright with promise and new with hope.
But the new year is about more than hope, it is also about resolution. Responsible people realize that if things are to be better in the new year, there are some things they must do and so we have New Year’s resolutions. What better time to take on the bad habit, incorporate the good behavior and just generally strive to be a better person? And so, it is these two things, hope and resolution, that I think make New Year’s Day a special holiday.
Hope and resolution — hopeful resolution … that’s not a bad way of describing the disciple’s life, for with Jesus our lives are full of both. The Scripture speaks of God giving us a “new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). Our hope is as alive as our Lord! Out of this hope we live for Him. We follow our new birth with a new life — one of hopeful resolution.
Here’s wishing your life is one of hopeful resolution in this year and all the years to come.
Find more of Green’s writings at his website: a-taste-of-grace-with-bruce-green.com