Happy New Year from the Pastor

One sign you are getting older is you stop marking time by days of the week or seasons. Bills, the kind you get from the power company or mortgage holder, teach us to measure time by the month. The birthdays of your children and wedding anniversaries push us toward annual observances. Before long "living for the weekend" is a fond memory similar to when you believed in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. From my perch at forty-one life is measured in years and often discussed in decades, as in "back in the eighties we used to ______." 

The older I get the more predictable the years become. Today is the first day of 2011. I can scan my calendar now and tell you where I am scheduled to be on most every day of this year. Just filling in the Monday to Friday workdays and church schedules will give somewhere around 80% of my year. That doesn't leave much discretionary time. I already know which days I will be off from work, which holidays will be observed, and approximately when I will take this year's vacations. With a little contemplation I can see that some weeks will be very busy. "Easter" weekend, and the week leading up to it, will be filled with preparations for Resurrection Sunday. Homecoming at church always comes with a lot of work. The month of December will probably have less than five nights when something won't be scheduled. Birthdays, anniversaries of various types, speaking engagements, and special services at church dot my calendar.

Yet, what is not on my calendar concerns me the most. The year 2011 will bring its share of good and bad. Of that I am sure. There is no way I can plan for it. Who knows when the news will come of a death or sickness? Children will be born, engagements announced, and life altering decisions made; and my calendar will be adjusted to accommodate as needed. Life will get in the way of what is planned. Count on it.

Which brings me to this point: what makes life so "alive" are the events and moments that can't be planned. God only knows what this year holds. And I mean that just the way it is written. 

So here I am, writing near the end of the first day of the year. I have my calendar, but it's just a skeleton of what will be in the year 2011. The year will be fleshed out as God brings each day to me and me to each day. So I pray, hoping to accept each day as a gift. And if you've taken enough time to read this far, I hope you have a wonderful year, the kind you think of as a gift.