We stand today in the in-between. The year 2022 is drawing to a close. In two days, the new year is about to burst forth before us, days yet unveiled but already full of His faithfulness.
The changing over of the calendar provides a brief moment to contemplate where we are headed, what we have done, and how we have changed. And to realize that this is not the ending of just another chapter but seamlessly continuing into the next.
Over the supper table just about every evening, as their large family comes together to eat, our son-in-law asks each of the kids, “What was good today? What was hard? Where (or how) did you see God today?”
It is a time of being heard and being seen, sharing stories –sometimes joys, sometimes tears, sometimes finding a solution even in the sharing of a trouble-- but always letting God reveal Himself. Oh, there He was.
What was good this year? What was hard? How did we see God in it? When we look back, those three questions are often one and the same. The good and the hard and His Presence are woven together.
Surely the LORD is in this place,
And I did not know it.
Genesis 28. 16
What if we lived that way? What if we prayed that way?
Not just in assessing a calendar year, but coming before Him every morning in prayer and contemplating every evening, the bookends of our day. Not just lamenting, “Oh, I should have done more.” “I really messed up.” “I’ll try do better tomorrow.” But thinking about, praying and praising what was good from His hand, what was hard beyond our understanding or strength, and how we abide with Him.
“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity,” wrote C. S. Lewis in 1942, a time when all the world was in turmoil.
An old friend included in her Christmas card this year, a challenge –still applicable today--to pray and to trust God into what we do not yet see, written by British poet Minnie Louise Haskins 114 years ago in 1908:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied…”Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be, to you, better than light and safer than a known way.”
May we look back on 2022 and see His Presence, His strength, His provision, and His love.
May we make prayer this year not just a practice or a habit, looking back or looking forward, but seamlessly woven in the now, praying and living out His dwelling with us in the coming year and in His present tense which knows no bounds.
By day the LORD commands His steadfast love,
and at night His song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
Psalm 42. 8
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