New Year Mercies

The new year has opened, for me, in a crisp, white whirl of snow and the shouted delight of my siblings. The great, blank days of January stretch clean and white and malleable before us. Time seems once more to reset itself, to offer not just a new day but a great heap of days in which we have the chance, all over again, to love, to hope, to give, create, and learn. Don't you love that God made the rhythms of our world in such a way that we are daily aware of renewal? The sun sinks down, but it rises again. The darkness grows, but so do the stars. Summer dies in the bonfire of autumn only to grow again in the verdant luxuriance of spring. The light fades through all the winter months only to burgeon with the waning of winter, stronger and stronger, like a child coming into the full golden stature of ripe and vibrant age in which all dreams may be dared, all loves kept alive.

This time of year my mind is taut with freshened possibility. My fingers itch to scratch out plans and dreams, to fill those square, white calendar pages with books to be read, people to love, essays to write. Those white spaces cry out to be filled with beauty, with music, with the given splendor of love in its thousand creative forms.

As I sit in a rose and golden dusk tonight, candles lit, my old Celtic music trilling through the blue-walled space of a room in which I have dreamed countless dreams (and seen them fulfilled - I'm at Oxford!), I'm praying for the grace to narrate a lively story into the coming days, to sketch life and color into the blank space of my hours, to make each day another tile in the mosaic of a life that incarnates the splendor of Christ.

I pray the same for you.

I pray that you will find hope in the clean, crisp days ahead, a muscled, vibrant hope like fire and light in your blood, to steel you for new creation, for freshened love. I pray that hope will be the light in your eyes that makes you profoundly conscious of the grace ever ready to make something new. (And I'll be writing more about this soon.)

I pray that you'll have great books in the new year, stories to widen the realms of your inner world. I pray that the room of your imagination will stretch and grew with newborn ideas and vivid imagery, that the words you encounter will make new worlds within your heart, and that you will take from their beauty to craft a great tale in your own true epic of a life.

I pray that you'll have music. I pray you'll be livened to the cadence of the everyday, the ordinary symphony of sunrises and sunsets, and I hope that great songs and family sing-alouds in the kitchen and violins keening at dusk will mark your hours. (If you need a few freshened ideas in that realm, follow my lead in listening to my sister's new favorite, Noah Gunderson, and see if you can find the soundtracks to Belle, and The King's Speech, as these are my soundtracks to life at the moment.)

I pray that you'll have hush. I pray that there are spaces of total quiet even amidst the busiest of days, when silence comes to you as the companion of prayer, and with it, the deepened breath of peace. I pray that in the quiet you notice the starlight, the sunlight veining a leaf, the contours of a face so familiar you've forgotten to marvel at its beauty. I pray that silence helps you and me both to see all that we miss of joy in the river-busy rush of our days.

I pray that you'll have laughter. Saints, I am convinced, must be the jolliest folk in the world. They may be the gravest at prayer or compassion, but they glimpse the life beyond our sorrow and when it comes to wonder, they are children. For they take the beauty of the world as a gift and sign and they meet it with a child's shouted delight. May you find joy in the world as the saints do, may its humor strike you as well as its grief, for as Chesterton said, he is a sane man who can hold both in his heart.

And I pray, amidst the countless other blessings I would give, that you will have fellowship in this new year, the comradeship of common dreams, the kindred beat of a heart that loves and hopes in the same direction. May feasts on holy days and teatimes for normal days and raucous dinnertime conversations fill the air of your home, may dreams be spoken, plans made, convictions be crafted in the shelter of the fellowship you find.

Ah friends, if there is one thing that strikes me hard and deep and to the core after just a few months of theology, it is the shocking possibility that came with the Incarnation. When God became man, when his life caught ours up in its glorious, powerful, ever-creative own, hope became an eternal force resident in our hearts. There is no end, no limit to the possibility of grace. His mercy is new every morning. Every day. Every year.

So walk ahead in mercy.

And happy new year!