Strolling through an art show earlier this year, I came upon a work which, as I reflect on it, captures, for me, the essence of the moment, this New Year and the liminality with which we deal every day.

     This work featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a vista of cloud and sun lying beyond.  We all seek vistas, don't we?  We all seek dreams and meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with tangles of difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Eventually, however, joy comes.  It's life, life in the world God has made.
     We live in a tenuous moment, a moment perched between what has been and what will come.  And we never fully understand either one.  On the other hand, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often loathe not knowing, we remain aware that without it life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, and vexing mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     As this New Year comes upon us, rejoice in the hiddenness and incomplete, the opaque implicit in the meaningfulness of existence.  Embrace the liminality of the divine activity intrinsic to humanness.  And step confidently into what is to come.
     Happy New Year!