Reflection
The future is full of promise, Holy Mystery,
if only because we discern your forces at work everywhere.
Every opening daffodil, every growing child
every glimmer of human enlightenment, every bodily process of healing—
tells us the future is not fearsome but is full of promise.
Your face is hidden, your name unknown:
still we turn to you in faith and confidence.
Creating Spirit, we hear your comforting voice
in the steady music of the unfolding of creation.
We give thanks to exist,
and to be the joy of your heart. Amen.
Prayers to an Evolutionary God
Prayer
Oh God, who are ever the same, grant us so to pass through the coming year with faithful hearts, that we may be able in all things to please You. Amen.
Mozarabic, 700 A.D.
Action
I will look to the year ahead with hope and confidence.
Suggested Reading
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.\\2 Corinthians 5:17
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23
O God you call us from our settled ways, out of old habits and rutted traditions. You call us into the land of promise, to new life and new possibilities. Make us strong to travel the road ahead. Deliver us from false security and comfort, desire for ease and uninvolved days. Let your Word and Spirit dwell in us that your will may be fulfilled in us for the well-being and shalom of all.
Amen.
Vienna Cobb Anderson
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Hal Borland
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
G.K. Chesterton
Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.
Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Each year’s regrets are envelopes in which messages of hope are found for the New Year.
John R. Dallas Jr.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust