Janus was often depicted with two faces: one looking forward and one looking back.
Like its namesake, January is a bit of a two-faced month.
It’s the month when we look back at the year that’s passed, and we look forward with hopeful anticipation to the year ahead.
Like many of you, I’m glad to see the back of 2022.
It was a year of disasters, starting with a pandemic and ending with floods.
It was a year we saw rampant inflation and cost-of-living pressures.
It was the year the housing crisis hit, and finding a rental house is the hardest it has been since the Great Depression.
I imagine there was a sense of relief on New Year’s Eve, and even celebration.
But what about 2023? We can hope it will be better, but will it really be?
That’s the problem with the new year.
We can make all the resolutions we like, and we can hope for the best, but we don’t actually know what lies ahead.
We can hope that inflation will ease and the cost of living will become more reasonable.
We can hope the housing crisis will somehow be resolved.
We can hope that COVID-19 will finally go the way of SARS, the plague and the Spanish flu.
We can hope that we will finally have a year without baking droughts and raging floods.
But what do our hopes actually achieve? Can the act of hoping actually achieve the reality we desperately want?
Christians have often dealt with this uncertainty by making the new year a time of prayer.
We may not know what’s coming, but God does, so we can do no better than to commend our hopes and fears for the new year into God’s hands.
We can’t make our hopes a reality; but God can.
Moreover, God has our wellbeing at heart, and we can trust God to look out for us, and do what’s best for us.
For millions of people around the world, this is a source of tremendous peace as we stand together on the precipice of a new and uncertain year.
Every new year, I’m reminded of these words written by the hymn writer Isaac Watts:
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defence is sure.
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.
May God bless and keep you through the new year ahead.
— Pastor Matthias Prenzler, Trinity Lutheran Church, Echuca
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