January 3, 2008
There is something special about turning the calendar on a new year. In the old days I always looked forward to the nice, new, blank calendars that we got at this time of the year. There was something exciting and invigorating about exchanging the old one with all of the old erasures and markups for a clean one with no mistakes and only the promise of the future.
These days I have a computerized calendar that goes on and on with no clean breaks between years. Because of the wonders of digitized editing there are no erasures or sloppy writing, but the bad news is that it is already half-filled for the year 2008, and there are more than a handful of appointments already scheduled for 2009. Some of them are color-coded and that makes it more acceptable aesthetically: blue for meetings of the Building Committee, orange for Staff meetings, purple for the United Methodist Church Foundation, etc. Nevertheless, a glance at the spring months is a daunting experience.
This year I am pondering the new calendar from a more philosophical perspective. In spite of the myriad appointments, January 1st represents a kind of graceful moment, a time when I look back with gratitude on all the good things of the past year, and a forgiving attitude on all things that didn’t go so well. It will all be archived in my computer, but I am practicing the art of “forgetting” the mistakes and missteps, the moments of lost temper or intemperate comments, the lapses in judgment or common sense, the disappointing sermons…I won’t go on and on, boring you with my failures.
I have come to believe that those “New Year resolutions” are not nearly as important as closing the chapter on the old year’s failures. At the very least I am quite sure that new resolutions have no power whatsoever to transform us without the experience of grace that comes with peacefully saying goodbye to the old year’s shortcomings.
At our best, and with a small amount of spiritual discipline, our opening of a new calendar can help us to better understand the most fundamental aspect of our relationship with God: a powerful grace that releases us from the past and empowers us for new beginnings. My New Year’s wish is that it might be so for both you and me.
