HAPPY NEW YEAR

Another Christmas is over, and it seems as if Christmas has already gone away into the dim and distant past. The New Year has arrived, and whilst Christmas itself has become a bit old hat, what people did over New Year, is still a subject of conversation. To Andrew and myself, it was very important that we were simply together when the clock struck twelve (as some of you will know, Andrew was very ill a year ago, and spent the first nine days of 2008 in Hospital). We tried keeping ourselves awake on New Years Eve, watching a DVD of "Ivor the Engine" (a fun Christmas presesnt I got from Andrew) but by 11.30 p.m., we were exhausted and went to bed, so we were asleep by midnight!
New Years Day was spent chilling out and walking in our much loved local Catton Park, before we had to face going back to work and getting back down to the nitty gritty of things. We all blithely say "Happy New Year" but we wonder what this year actually holds for us. We hear all the depressing stuff in the news about all the dreadful things happening in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe's regime, and every week in church, we are praying for peace in Iraq, the Middle East, Afghanistan and the Congo Region. Madeleine McCann has still not been found, the family have been given a number of false hopes that have lead nowhere. Also there are big changes afoot in the world as Barack Obama gets sworn in as the first coloured Pesident of the U.S.A. Then there's the financial climate, and what it's going to do for Andrew and myself personally, and everyone else. We hear on the News that the credit crunch is likely to affect us for the next four years, so it's all doom and gloom.
As I type this, it is "Twelfth Night" or the Season of the Epiphany, which is the actual time when the Wise Men (or the Magi) visited the the Christ child in Bethlehem. We had a very lively pre-Epiphany service on Sunday, where the children acted out the story of the journey of the Magi, from the point of view of "Sandy the Camel". My next port of call will be to dismantle the Christmas Tree and put all the decs away in the loft. I am reminded here, of a sermon we had some years ago from Rev. Pam Goddard who was an assistant curate at St. Lukes Church. She told us that now that the decorations were put away, they were no longer there to sidetrack us, and that we should focus our minds fully on Jesus, and the purpose for which he was born to us. Let this be our prayer to each and everyone who trusts in him.