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Of New Years

             Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Isaiah 43:18-19)

As I write this, it’s still 2024. By the time you read it, it will be 2025. Happy New Year! Do you feel any different? OK, assuming that you got a good night’s sleep and don’t have a hangover, do you feel any different? We make big deals about new years. Some of us think in terms of new months, or new pay periods, or new days.  Why don’t we get excited about new hours, minutes, or seconds? One reason is that the celebration would take more time than the new time-period. Another is that they happen too often. But a third is that while we fool ourselves about new years, we recognize that the break between this time-period and that isn’t magical. The time periods are convenient constructs, but they’re arbitrary and artificial. Another is that while we may fool ourselves about bigger time periods, we know that there are not many humungous changes in our experiences.

This lack of humungous change was the problem the Jews faced with Jesus. They expected someone to show up and kick the Romans and their collaborators out. In a word, they wanted something miraculous or at least magical. And I think we are sometimes as disappointed as the Jews. We read that God was doing a new thing. We tell ourselves that this referred to Jesus’ first advent. And it did, but it’s not what the Jews wanted.

This new year is probably not what we wanted, either. If new is “springing up,” we don’t perceive it at all, or it’s bor-ring. After all, we’ll have to go through 31,536,000 seconds. There will be countless grains of sand that will irritate us within our oyster shell lives. Oh, there might be sea snails and crabs that want to devour us, but it’s the sand we’ll notice. It’s the sand we’ll worry. It’s the sand we should worry  (“2. tear at, gnaw on, or drag around with the teeth.”) Because it’s the sand that will turn into pearls as a result. It’s always a long, uncomfortable task, but those pearls are new things God is doing.

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