New Year

People make a fuss about the New Year. The New Year is a time for looking back over the last year. The New Year is a time for new beginnings and resolutions. In my family, pickled herring was a New Year’s requirement. Everyone had to have a piece. I happen to like pickled herring. My kids never took to it. In fact all my loved ones hide when I pull out the jar of herring! I have a dear friend who must have black eyed peas. I think they taste like old gym socks, but he eats them religiously every year. One good friend is Jewish and one is Chinese. They have New Year on different days and months.

But calendars and clocks and New Years are all very superficial and contrived. Time is a human concern. The only thing that matters is this second. That’s what you have and that’s what I have. We get to make choices right now. All the resolutions in the world mean nothing unless we make the choices now. Does that mean we don’t plan for the future? Of course not! Life is full of paradoxes. We live now. We learn from our past, but we don’t live there. We prepare for the future, but we can’t predict what will happen there.

Life is imperfect and often messy. I realized this over Christmas in a new way. One son did not show up at the other son’s house. Strange things seemed to be happening. The other grandma hit the nail on the head. Son #2 did not have money for gifts and was embarrassed. Son #1 is doing well and felt deprived because he could not give the gifts to his brother. Son # 2 made excuses not so see everyone else. Once I unraveled this, I shared the information with the right people. Life is messy. And that’s just fine. Music at church was good, but not as good as I had hoped. Since I am the music director, that sort of matters, but I also realized that life can be a little messy there. And just like my family, everyone grew a little from the messiness of the experience.

So, instead of grandiose resolutions, instead of expectations of near perfection, instead of lists of things I wish I would do, I have a very simple resolution. This year, I will continue to strive to make now the most important thing and to realize that life is messy and that’s OK. Thanks be to God for the messiness of life!