The Precipice of Another Year
Happy New Year's Eve!
It is my earnest prayer for you that you have spent the past week of Christmas-tide reflecting, eating Christmas cookies and snacks to your heart's content, and enjoying the people and the things you love. The days feel fuzzy, the moments feel long and soft, and I hope you’re enjoying some true self and soul care in this pause.
This moment, as we stand on the precipice of another year, is always a moment for clear-headed reflection in my life. It inspires a taking stock, a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” of my year and my behavior. Sometimes, as I come out of my cookie-induced-coma, I am unhappily greeted with the sobering realization that I have not been whom I wanted to be, that I have not loved or lived in a manner that’s worthy of the leading of Jesus in my life. I am accosted by the number on the scale, the apology tour I must take, and the gap that stands between myself and the ideal. Luckily enough, the world joins me in this reflection. And, each New Year's Eve, we as a society toast with sparkling something and watch the ball drop and decide that we may be better again. New Year's Eve is an opportunity after a moment of extravagant indulgence to put ourselves on the right path and to re-engage with our discipleship, our health, and our relationships.
As we said on Christmas Eve, some of us did “declutter our Christmas,” but some of us just… didn’t. We may have tried, but found ourselves overwhelmed by the swell of Christmas obligation and emotion. The New Year again offers us an opportunity, though less religious, to reset our lives and to let Jesus be the Lord of them. I’m not sure what that means for you: more regular participation in worship, deepening devotional and scripture-reading practice, joining a class online or in person, re-engaging your children in Kid’s Ministry, or serving in a new way in the life of the church, but we at Suntree are committed to joining you and engaging the opportunity to be a people of Extraordinary Love.
This Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Epiphany as these ordinary, secular Wise Men are given the revelation of Jesus’s lordship. They follow the bright light of the star to encounter the light of Christ, and the politics, power, prestige stop mattering to them as they see this vulnerable babe in the manger. They see themselves, the gap in whom they’ve said they’ll be, and they go home a different way.
I hope as you re-emerge from the fuzziness of this in-between week, you’ll see your own opportunity to follow the light of Christ in your life. You are invited to join us as we seek to love our neighbors and our world well in this new year. In that, I hope that you, too, feel the extraordinary power of Emmanuel, God with us, at work in you, too.
See you Sunday,
Allee Willcox