Prayers for a New Year

 

Happy New Year!!  This week I am inviting you to listen to your life ~ your heart, soul, mind, body, all that is within you and around you.  To slow down and breathe today.  You don’t have to have the next 365 days all plotted and planned.  You don’t need an alphabetized resolution list that you will grind your way through with grit.  Your salvation (which is to say your wholeness and integration and faithfulness) is not based on what you do.  God’s love (which is to say the healing and hope ~ our very ground of being) is unconditional and unceasing.  God’s love doesn’t give grades or badges to put on your heavenly sash.  Sorry, no jewels for your heavenly crown…no extra credit for carrying the cross…no earning your way.  Your way is paved with grace upon heaping helping of grace.  But what happens when we don’t feel that way?  What happens when our inner critic goes into hyperdrive or says the thing we did not want to say out loud…in public…for everyone (and God) to hear?  What then?  We breathe.  We ask for forgiveness.  We lean into everlasting arms of healing and hope and love from God.  We return again and again and again to who we are (God’s child) and whose we are (God’s beloved) to live those truths again.  May that bless you each day in 2025.  And here is another blessing for you.

 

Entering the New Year

God of all time, help us enter the New Year quietly,

thoughtful of who we are to ourselves and to others,

mindful that our steps make an impact and our words carry power.

May we walk gently.

May we speak only after we have listened well.

Creator of all life, help us enter the New Year reverently, aware that you have endowed every creature and plant, every person and habitat with beauty and purpose.

May we regard the world with tenderness.

May we honor rather than destroy.

Lover of all souls, help us enter the New Year joyfully, willing to laugh and dance and dream,

remembering our many gifts with thanks and looking forward to blessings yet to come.

May we welcome your lavish love. May we cast off the small, vindictive god our fears have made. May the grace and peace of Christ bless us now and in the days ahead.

- Vinita Hampton Wright 

 

Blessed are you, my friends, especially when/where there is no evidence to prove that.  Amen.