It's a new day, a new month, a new year.  It's a time of resolution, aspiration, goal, vision, and intention, a time that our hearts, even if only for a moment, spur us to new heights of achievement, new pictures of who we think we ought to be.
     As it should.  We are creatures made to long to become something better than what we are at the moment, what we are today.  It is part of being human.  We all want improvement, we all want renewal.  Indeed, pity the person who supposes that she needs neither.
     Yet does not the writer of Ecclesiastes point out that, "There is nothing new under the sun"?  Absolutely.  But he also urges us to "do whatever our hand finds to do."  These are wise words.  Yes, life is a merry go round of routine and repetition (after all, it is but one more year), but life is also a voyage of wonder.  It is a journey through our brokenness and sin, but it is also a journey through the inexhaustibility of God.  We and our planet may be changing, aging, even, unfortunately, deteriorating, but God remains new, unspeakably new for us and our world.  Always.  His infinite presence guarantees it.
     Rejoice.   Yet rejoice most fully in God.  As the New Year dawns, realize that it is in God that we will experience the fullness of life, that it is in God that we will see the ultimate picture of existence.  It is in God that we will see the highest vision of what we can be, that is, saved, renewed, and set free, morally, epistemologically, culturally, and more.  It's all part of our creator's endless wonder for us, all part of the magnificent promise he embodied, in his son Jesus, for our world.
     Happy New Year.