A Prayer on New Year's Day

Dear Lord,

It is New Year's Day. This is a day of new beginnings, a day to take stock of all that has come before and all that may lie ahead, and above all, a day to give thanks to you for the blessings behind, around, and before me.

Thank you for my beautiful family. Thank you for my husband, who walks together with me in good times and in bad, and for our children, two spritely and creative and amazing gifts given to us to shape and protect. Thank you, God, for the love in this family. It sustains me day in and day out.

Thank you for shelter and safety. Thank you for the ability to lie down in peace each night, to wake up to secure surroundings and enough food to eat. May I never forget those whose circumstances are different. May I never stop working to help make a difference where life is difficult-- those places where your son is always already at work.

Thank you for beauty. Thank you for music and poetry and best efforts and strivings against all odds.

Thank you for the will to forgive. Thank you for the patient and loving guidance that helps me grant to others the most important gift you've granted to me.

God, I have so much passion to do the work you've given for me to do. So much passion to proclaim the life and death of your son, the places where salvation and grace and love flow so freely and abundantly for all of us. Let me especially help the broken, the doubting, and the uncertain to see the ways in which you are at work in their lives and in the world. Help me to sing and dance the joys and possibilities that await in your community of believers. Help me to be a beacon in the doorway of your church.

Let me do these things in your way and in your time, but I am so full, Lord. So full of excitement and ideas and questions and energy. If you will it, let this year give shape to these desires, and let those who travel and seek with me burst into bloom in their own unique ways. Knit me ever more solidly together with my family, Lord-- my husband and children, and the body of Christ.

Make me your instrument, Lord God, and let me play your song, every moment of every day in the coming year.

I cannot wait to see where the music leads.