The Christmas season and preparation is over, but now it’s time to enjoy and live with the new changes that have come about. It’s a new year, a time for newness and renewing. Every year I try to make a new year’s resolution, and every year I try to make at least one of those something completely accomplishable. The point of resolutions and making new isn’t to have the goal be completely unattainable.
Failure is good. It teaches lessons. But we can’t fail all the time. If we do, we’ll lose our encouragement and hope for the future. Resolutions are exactly what that’s about. It’s a time when we look to the future and things we want to see happen, and then for the next year, we work toward that.
Change isn’t easy. It isn’t always fast, and it doesn’t always happen at the snap of the fingers. Jesus wasn’t born right after Mary was told she was pregnant. And he didn’t grow up to be a man as soon as the new year rolled around. We’re a church still in its adolescence, and we have to grow up. But the thing is, we have time to grow up. It doesn’t have to happen all at once, and it doesn’t need to happen right this very second.
The Christmas season is preparation for what is to come. It’s only a short four weeks to prepare for the entire year. It’s not a lot of time when you think about it. We are the ones who have to move from preparation into action. We’ve decided and seen the changes that are about to happen this year, some of them we will never see coming, but hopefully we’ll be prepared to deal with them in a way we weren’t prepared before. Hopefully, we’ll be ready for whatever it is God throws at us.