New Year
New Year, new start, if only, you wish!
My childhood memories of New Year was typical of many working class families in Glasgow where housewives/mothers would be busy right up to the stroke of midnight getting the house spick and span, scrubbing, cleaning, polishing, making sure they “entered†the New Year with no dirt, no debt. Nothing of the past clinging to their apron strings, a new year means a fresh start.
I suppose that memory has left me with a sort of paranoia about getting things ready for the New Year.
I used to get sent down to the close mouth with a lump of coal and shouted up at the stroke of midnight since it was ‘lucky’ to welcome a tall, dark, handsome and yes sometimes I was a stranger in my own home, carrying a lump of coal for good fortune into the house as the ‘firstfoot’!
When I was young I imbibed all this in, but now that I have grown up a little I know that New Year’s Day doesn’t change much from the night before. In my more cynical moments I sometimes think nothing makes a difference….and yet because I am a Christian and also the Pastor of a Christian community, I do see the difference having a relationship with Jesus makes for all sorts of people. People struggling with, debt, with doubt, with grief, with pains of all kinds and often rising above them because of the strength they find in their relationship with Jesus Christ.
Through Him I have discovered every kind of opportunity to embrace ‘newness’. What a relief and liberation from childhood and adult hang-ups and fears!