Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

 January takes its name from Janus, that god of the ancient world who looked both ways.

Sometimes we are encouraged not to look back too much and maybe the words of St Paul ring in our minds when he talks of forgetting what is behind.  And yet, wasn’t it Jesus who encouraged us to do this in remembrance of me?  So, scripture is a bit like Janus, depending which bits you read it encourages us to look both ways.

Surely life is always a balance of the two.  Too much looking behind and we get stuck in the past.  Yet plunge headlong into tomorrow, with no thought of the journey thus far, and we are liable to make the mistakes of yesterday once more.

It’s easy for the future to scare us with all its uncertainties, and maybe even our new diaries unsettle us with empty pages as we wonder what will come up and fill the days of 2023.

However, I’m not sure those pages are totally empty.  I’d rather think of them as the spaces we have yet to occupy but in which God is already present, waiting for us.  God beckons us into the future with the promise to walk every step beside us, so that every day is full of his love, light, peace and hope.  God greets us as we step into tomorrow with the word welcome.  The future is possible, and we don’t have to face it alone.

Travel well into 2023 as you take the hand of God and walk into a New Year.