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From The Landmark for January, 2007. Dear Friends, Marjorie Holmes once wrote, “For me each New year is like opening an intriguing mystery story. What’s going to happen? Where will it lead?” We hope it will lead somewhere good. This year at our staff Christmas party we toasted for a better new year, because in 2006 some of us lost loved ones and for others a close relative has been seriously ill. As we grow older and wiser, we know that with all the excited expectations of New Year beginnings also comes a certain sadness that this might be a year that will have lasts — the last Thanksgiving with Uncle Tom, the final birthday for an aged mother...
King George VI of England used the following as his New Year’s message to his empire in 1939: “I said to the man at the gate of the New Year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread the darkness’; but he replied to me: ‘Go forth into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.’” At the turnstile of a New Year, goodwill for each other is often expressed by a pagan wish for “a Happy New Year.” Pagan, I note, because the word happy is derived from ‘hap,’ meaning ‘luck.’ Thus the joy of the coming year is expected to come from favorable circumstance, fortunate happening around one—the weather clear, neighbors congenial, business prosperous, and nations peaceful—things over which one had little or no control. No wonder that happiness is regarded as a hit-or-miss joy, and the pursuit of happiness likened to “a pig with a greasy tail, which everyone runs after, but nobody can hold.” Jesus does not talk about happiness, but he talks about abundant life and blessedness:
Blessed are the poor in spirit …
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are the meek…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
Blessed are the merciful…
Blessed are the pure in heart…
Blessed are the peacemakers… The Beatitudes are impotent to change bad luck to good (the whims of neighbors, the cycles of business), but they are powerful developers of our spiritual lives. A Beatitude is an attitude of being—being right with the laws of the universe, right with God’s thoughts—that brings soul-health. Jesus says that joy and blessedness are the predictable derivatives of forming one’s life to the beatitudes. They are springs which pour forth freely in good times and in bad, in all the seasons of our life. Therefore, friends, I offer you a Christian greeting and wish for you in the year 2007 the best I know—A BLESSED NEW YEAR!
Kendrick [ Read the entire January Landmark as a PDF file.]
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