Dear Readers,
What will the new year bring for you? Are you happy to see the back of this past year and do you believe that January marks is the opportunity for a fresh start?
Our emotions and mentality is so very closely bound up with our calendar – by looking at our diary we see what we are supposed to be doing and therefore what we are supposed to be feeling too. Yet our real emotions don’t fit into a calendar. When everyone else is celebrating we may feel like being alone, or vice versa.
We can’t live without a calendar, or a diary, or some sort of plan for what lies ahead. What happens when real life breaks into that plan? We feel disrupted and disconcerted, yet that happens all the time. Our plans are cancelled or postponed, we have to improvise think on our feet or start again. The truth is we never know what is around the corner. For the optimist that thought is full of wonderful possibilities; for the pessimist it is scary - better the devil you know.
January can often feel like an anti-climax (after Christmas) and February is the month where Lent begins, a time for retreating into ourselves, a quiet time, a time of stripping down to the core of what we are. This period of the year is important as it offers a chance for spiritual hibernation – by which I mean a chance to let go of the need to party, to celebrate, to be cheerful and simply be who you are. The chance to settle into a period of introspection. I’d like to think that the start of the new year can be a time when we free ourselves of expectations. We can simply be the people God made us to be, whether that is happy or sad, optimistic or pessimistic, contented or anxious.
May this year bring for you the blessings that you hope for and some you never expected.
Revd Steven Rothwell