A new calendar year stretches before us, stirring up fresh resolve in many of us to change our circumstances or ourselves during the next twelve months. Some will write official New Year’s resolutions, making lists of goals to accomplish. Others will not be so formal, writing secret New Year’s longings on our hearts.
Our reading from Colossians also reveals the hope of living a better life. But it is God’s hope for our lives that is recorded in this passage, not a list of resolutions that we have created. In these verses, we find some of God’s deepest hopes for us: hopes for changes needed in the world from this moment onward and hopes made all the more possible by following Jesus.
How might this new year be different from years past if we resolve to grow in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience? If this day becomes a day of forgiveness, a day that we set our intention either to offer or to accept forgiveness—not in general terms, but with someone in mind—what new life possibilities will open up for us and for others? And even better, what if we set a new-year intention to make forgiveness a spiritual life practice, a daily pattern of prayer and response for which God has already given us an example in Jesus?
And finally, what if our night prayer from this time onward —a prayer to guide our resolutions and hopes, whatever they may be—could rise out of God’s word:
Through this night, O God, and in every waking moment, clothe me with your love. Bind me in perfect harmony to everything you love, and open my heart more and more each day to carry the peace of Christ. Amen.