The Holiday Season is behind us and, if you are like most people, you enter the New Year with a huge sigh of relief. You settle into your easy chair, kick off your shoes, and thank Your Maker for a much-deserved rest. I know, you probably enjoyed the holidays; decorating, cooking, entertaining, visiting, eating, buying, wrapping, giving, getting, unwrapping, cleaning, singing, worshiping, and everything else, that I’m just too tired to remember. How did we make time for it all?

Yes, you deserve a rest, or at least the chance to slow down just a little. However, just as we begin to make ourselves comfortable, the cares and concerns of our everyday life come knocking at the door and rouse us from or resting place. Back to school, back to work, manage the household, pay the bills, clean the kitchen, wash the car, wash the kids, wash the dog… you get the picture. Our days are filled with the seemingly mundane tasks that are necessary just to make it from one day to the next; tasks that, while sometimes necessary, leave little time for physical, emotional, and spiritual renewal. So we trade the busyness of the holiday season, for the grind-it-out, day-to-day, living that leaves us empty and yearning for something better.

We look to the new year as a time of new possibilities (resolutions anyone?), yet we carry with us many of the same responsibilities, attitudes, and habits. We want to look forward, hoping that this year will be better than the last, but a glance over our shoulder reminds us that we’ve been wrong before. There is a simple answer to our dilemma. In Matthew chapter eleven, Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” And it really is just that simple.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those who say, “If you just have enough faith, everything will be alright.” It’s a complex world we live in and being a person of faith doesn’t negate the challenges we face, but faith is our connection to the one in whom we place our trust. And through that connection comes a “peace that passes understanding,” because…

“We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. So I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong. The God revealed in Jesus whom I call the Christ is a God whose forgiveness goes ahead of me, and whose love sustains me and the whole created world.” – Verna Dozier

May God bless you this year as you purpose in your heart to know Jesus in a meaningful way.

Blessings on you and yours
Allen