Dear Friends,
Happy New Year! I hope you launch into 2025 hopefully and happily. For many, the champagne-fueled ball-drop of happy excitement is followed by a hangover of anxiety for what the new year might bring. I’d like to say, may all your holidays be holy days.
Ever since December 25th, and on through Epiphany, we’re in that odd-feeling other-world of after-Christmas Christmas, in which the season of Christmas technically goes on into the New Year but we’re sweeping up pine needles and packing the decorations away, and trying to remember to write 2025 on our checks, and it doesn’t really feel all that holiday-ish anymore. Or maybe it’s just that we’re weary of trying to feel festive.
It may be easier, though, if we do treat our holidays as holy days. Recovering the Holy is an easier, simpler process than recovering the Festive. All we have to do is open our eyes to the sacred within the everyday—a smile from a friend, the sound of the rain, walking your child to the school bus stop in the slush, even a small joy of remembrance as we’re wearily packing away the ornaments. If we choose, it can all be holy, for the Christ child continues to be born in every act of love we give and receive. Look for him. Seek and you shall find.
My favorite after-Christmas Christmas Scripture is Luke 2:52, following the story of Jesus as a boy teaching the elders in the temple. It’s the last thing we hear about Jesus before the story picks up in his adulthood: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” That one sentence sums up all of Jesus’ years of growth from child to Messiah—all those days of ordinary living and loving that weren’t important enough to the story to make the book’s final cut, and yet made him the Savior he was to be.
Enjoy the new year. Try not to fret about what may come. Most of what our fears draw us to imagine never happens, and the pains that do find us are often unexpected. So enjoy while you can this sacred, ordinary time that is no holiday but can be holy day. God is with us, Emmanuel, in every tiny act of love. Joy to the world, the Lord is come. May we all increase in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favor.
Love and light,
Martin
Comments