What are your hopes and plans for the New Year? This is a question I often ask others and also try to take extra time with at the end of every year. The basis of this question includes a few basic assumptions which are important to understand and also help us to better respond to the question. Of course, the basic assumption is that we do have the capacity to hope. This is a dream that we will both experience and have influence on those days which do not yet exist! This is indeed a miracle in itself.
Integral to the idea of hope is the concept of time. Our current culture tends to assume both the past and the future, which was not always the case throughout history. The past for each of us has included many difficulties and many blessings unique to our own lives and interpretations. Depending on how we view our past, we may be very angry, hurt, disappointed or grateful. But, I believe, at the very least, we should recognize that the time we have been given already is more than we deserve. Life has provided time to grow and learn and time to impact the lives of others. For this reason, we should decide to be grateful and to use what we have learned in order to live with more wisdom in the future. But who can guarantee that we have more time to live? Can we assume that we will be given another day of life? If I wake up tomorrow, it will be another miracle and a blessing that cannot be paid for with any amount of money, power or influence. When I take the past and the future for granted, I ignore one of the greatest blessings in life - the opportunity to live with gratefulness for the past and hope for the future!
In taking time for granted, we also ignore the opportunity to live differently and to benefit from the wisdom of our previous days and experiences. The most significant of these experiences for each of us usually centers on the concept of forgiveness. In my own life, what has hurt me most is not the hurtful actions of other people toward me, but my refusal to forgive them. When I do not forgive, there is a cancer that eats away at my heart, not allowing me to enjoy life or relationships or even to have meaningful hope for my future. My mind is distracted by what I cannot control, the actions or words of others. My energy and time are spent on that which has no real benefit for me or for anyone else. However, when I learn to forgive others and to be grateful both for the lessons they have taught me and for the opportunity to grow through difficult circumstances, then something significant has happened. I realize that I am not the center of the universe, that I have been blessed beyond measure and that each new day is a gift. Both the ability to forgive and to be grateful for everything are essential if we are ever to have real hope for the future.
Looking back at the history of the Israelites leaving Egypt gives us some insight into how these attitudes impact a community. They were constantly told to remember: remember that you were slaves in Egypt, remember that God brought you out with a mighty hand, remember how God provided for you in the wilderness, remember the covenant God has made with you, remember to obey God's commands which are for your good and for your blessing. Many of these reminders fell on deaf ears because they refused to be grateful. This in turn restricted their ability to learn from the past and to hope and trust in God's goodness and provision for their future. Even though they had been freed from physical slavery, they were still enslaved to their past though their refusal to be grateful and so to trust God.
Can you see echos of this slavery to the past in your community? How about in your own life? This slavery to the past means we will always be a victim unless we learn to forgive and to be grateful. When we learn to see that God has allowed us to live and to experience difficult things in order to help us grow, then we honor His purposes, recognize His goodness and learn to trust Him for our future as well.
It is only then that I can begin to really answer the first question, "What are my hopes and plans for the New Year?" Now I am free to hope. Now there is a purpose in planning. Now we begin to understand the gift of life and the significance of this point in time. Our plans can be shaped by God's plans because we begin to recognize what He has been doing in our lives and our potential based on what He has promised to do. Our hope is in Him because without His forgiveness for my sin, there is no power to forgive others. Most importantly, our plans will not be centered on our own benefit but on the growth of His kingdom in our relationships and community because that is the only thing of real value, bringing hope and purpose to others through the knowledge of Him.
...but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. Romans 5:3-5
Here are a few related questions that can help bring clarity to our basic question... What ministries and projects will I invest in this next year? What topics do I need to learn more about? Which relationships do I need to invest in? How will I organize my daily priorities and schedule to accomplish this? How will I spend more quality time in God’s Word with my wife and boys? How will our budget and actual spending reflect our values as a family? One of my goals for the New Year is to share some of my findings from my personal study of God's Word here in this blog. My personal study in the past several months has been rich and rewarding as I learn to connect what God says through His story of the world to what is happening in the world around me, in my own work and family context, and in my own heart. This is a process that brings real hope because it teaches me to see the bigger picture of life, to be truly grateful for what God has given and to put into practice the habits of forgiveness and gratitude by His grace at work in me.
Next year I will share some of my insights from Ecclesiastes. Solomon struggled deeply with the concepts of hope, gratefulness and ultimate meaning in life and he has some important things to share with us!
