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Many people find it useful to bring some focus to the end of one calendar year and the start of a new one. This happens in a variety of ways. Some approaches are shaped by our families of origin, some by faith traditions, some by cultural particularity. The list could go on and on. For many persons several streams come together to create the currents of how we approach the new year. There isn’t just one way to “do it”. What action or practice we choose matters far less than how we approach the new year.

I am persuaded that that it is to the latter that we are called. Now would be a great time to claim this pattern for living. It can and will make an enormous difference in the church and in the world. It may seem like a small and insignificant thing to be so claimed by God’s love in Jesus Christ that our way of being is marked by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. But it is the little ostensibly insignificant things that make a world of difference. After all wasn’t it just Christmas and we were celebrating the gift of life in a fragile, vulnerable baby; a seemingly insignificant birth of just another poor kid. What a world of difference he has made. What about us?