Dear fellow journeyers on the Way,

Whether or not you are one who is intentional about making specific “New Years Resolutions” – and whether or not you keep them up for more than a week or two, I hope you will take some quiet time during these next days to reflect. Reflect on the year just past, and on the new one just beginning. Give thanks for the people/things/events for which you have gratitude, and offer prayers for those which disappoint/anger/frustrate you. And please - please vow to do all in your power to increase and support the first batch, and help relieve the second.

In his wonderful little book called Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, Frederick Buechner – in the entry about “Life” – writes:

The temptation is always to reduce it to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery.

After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.”

Have you wept at anything the past year?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty?
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you are going to die?
More often than not, do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody you know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?
If your answer to all or most of these questions is No, the chances are that you’re dead.

My hope/prayer/resolution for this year is to live life abundantly, and I wish the same for each of you. May God bless us all!

George+