A New Year
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A Year with Rilke translated & edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows | HarperCollins © 2009
Ah. 2013 stretches out so fresh and clean. As I begin the new year in England (for just a few days more), I am reminded of the first post I wrote on my other blog, everyday poetry, last June.
…and so it begins. And beginnings aren’t often beautiful or dramatic or clear-cut. Often, they overlap with endings or middles, all of them muddled together into a minty mess that is sometimes tasty and sometimes overpowering.
I prefer my beginnings to be precise. And so I wait. But precise beginnings only come in retrospect, not in the living out; it’s when you’re telling the story that you can pinpoint the start of something.
Back then, I didn’t have any inkling that I would be writing here at Gimme Some Reads, alongside Ali, Sarah, and Liz. Or that I would get to be in England twice in one year, plus Sweden and Estonia! And yet, all that happened — along with so many other everyday things.
Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner | HarperCollins © 1992
To begin is rarely easy, but often simple. To hope, is similarly not easy, yet usually simple. I think January 1st is the one day every year when hoping and beginning are both simple and easy.
Anything is possible. Everything matters. Always imagine. Let’s go.
To hold fast to the truths of God’s Word and my Savior, Jesus Christ and to walk humbly before Him. To share His love, hope, grace and mercy w/those He puts in my path. To let go of all the sins, lost dreams, struggles and disappointments of the past and begin the new year as fresh and white and peaceful as the white layering of snow still coming down covering the brown, dry grass of last years drought. To press on and lay hold of the life God has ordained for me.
As Paul wrote in Philippians 3:10-14: “I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”