There are days before the new year begins, and we are on a journey to visit Kyle, Susan, Stuart, Roger, and Maggie. We take far too few trips to Texas, and our excitement is running ahead of us. The flight is on time, and in just minutes we will be in the air and heading southwest. My fear of flying above the clouds is masked only by the anticipation of those hugs and smiles from our children and grands.
Kathy’s favorite part of flying is the race down the runway seconds before lift-off. She claims the window seat and smiles broadly as she watches the landscape speed by, and she squeezes my hand at the feel of sinking into the seat as the plane lifts from the ground and takes to the sky. My favorite part is watching her joy. Beyond that, my attention is on a safe landing at Dallas Love Field and our reunion.
I’m not an enthusiastic flyer to say the least, and I need some distractions between the start and end of the journey.
One of our travel traditions is reading aloud to each other. Years ago, our family go-to books included JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the phenomenal stand-alone novel The Hobbit. To this day, quotables from these tales remain in the lexicon of the Edminson clan. Some seem particularly apt these days as we proceed from one year to the next: “Where there’s life there’s hope” and even “It’s a dangerous business…going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
On recent trips, Kathy reads from a series of mysteries set in the fictional salt marshes of Norfolk. Author Elly Griffith writes about transitional spaces, the places between the sea and the sky that merge into the endless dark gray days of winter. In her books, these spaces are magical in their range of possibilities; they are also, at times, frightening in their unfamiliarities.
This is somewhat how I feel living between past and future as the New Year looms. So much opportunity and wonder! And yet so much is hidden.
Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher Richard Rohr writes about these liminal places “where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown…a good space where genuine newness can begin.” From his New Mexico desert home, he sees the world’s ambiguity with different eyes than the ones I peer through in North Carolina’s piedmont. Despite the differences, the wonder persists. The future is unknown, and I choose faith as I step into the coming days.
The apostle Paul puts it much better:
"Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13-14)
Here, the word “forgetting” means “dismissing from the mind or paying no attention to,” to stop dwelling on something, to dismiss distraction from the mind, to focus on the important parts.
My home pastor Al Gaspard reminded the church that we can trust an unknown future to our well-known Lord and Savior. Back then, we had Watch Night services in the hours between the year passing and the one beginning. As a community of believers, we sang and prayed as the clock moved from known to unknown. We gladly proceeded into a new year because we knew that Jesus already inhabited that place.
These memories swirl in my mind as the plane flies on. I see beloved faces of family now gone on, I hear again the countdown of minutes before midnight, I feel the thrill of all the possibilities the new year seems to promise. My heart embraces the opportunity to begin again.
The prophet Isaiah proclaimed hope in his days as he recorded words of our Creator God:
"Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." (Isaiah 43:19)
Journeys, both small and large, await each of us as the new year begins. Will the days ahead bring promises fulfilled? Will we struggle with untold circumstances? Will we add to or subtract from our circle of family and friends? And will we walk boldly into the unknown, trusting the omnipotent God of the Cosmos?
Happy New Year, friends. May you follow closely where our Lord leads.
Written by Jim Edminson, Editor of Charity & Children