New Year's Day, 2009

New Year's Day, 2009


Yesterday we wrote the date '2008', and today we write it '2009'. And although each day follows another, once a year we reach the milestone of the completion of one year and the beginning of a new one. New Year's Day is the one day where we can both look back on a fully completed year, and also forward on a year that is still untouched.


I've now seen twenty-two New Year's Days. And as each day comes hard on the heels of the one before, and often seem to blur together in memory, many of those years have come and gone, blurring together with little to distinguish them from the year before or after, except that each one seems to go faster than the one before it.


But my 2008 doesn't blur in with all the others. This past year, now completed, took me through some of the deepest experiences of my life. It's been a year that has seen my most daring hopes, my most challenging surrenders, and my most undeserved blessings. It has tested my relationship with God in very acute ways, and also my relationship with man. And at the end of 2008 I can only repeat what has been the theme of my life for the last several years: Hitherto hath the Lord helped me.


I just want to thank God for His eternal faithfulness. I want to thank Him for keeping me in His will, for 'holding up my goings in His paths, that my feet have not slipped'. I want to thank Him that because of His forgiveness and grace and faithfulness, I can look back on the past year without the haunting of vain regrets or unsurrendered ambitions. And more than that, that I can look forward on the new year of 2009, though full of unknowns, without doubts.


And in a life of unknowns, in a world of uncertainty, in a time of unpredictable events, that is a confidence that only God can give, and a surety that we can only receive when we completely surrender to Him.


Above all other blessings, 2008 marks the year the Lord blessed me with the most precious and priceless gift man has ever known - something above success, above wealth, above health, above fame, above power. Something I can't buy, or earn, or deserve. It's the matchless gift of one true love - an amazing, Godly, and entirely beautiful woman whom I have admired and esteemed above any other I have known.


I love you Cara, and I thank God for you every day!