A blessed new year to you. Hopefully, Christmas 2023 was everything you hoped it would be. For us, a grandson had COVID, so it messed up most of our plans. But we gathered by Zoom, met outside for the exchange of gifts, and shared meals separately.
If you have just completed reading the entire Bible in one year, congratulations. What an incredible accomplishment! No doubt you are a very different person today than you were a year ago. The Bible causes us to “be transformed by the renewal of our minds.” Yet this is not the end of the journey; the Bible promises to give us the Word and the words for the year to come.
What passages and portions of Scripture that spoke to us most clearly in 2023 may be different in 2024? For us, we just learned that our daughter’s cancer has returned. After 15 years and four remissions, we are facing another uncertain future.
This means we are gravitating toward different parts of the Bible than last year. We have returned to the Psalms of lament, such as Psalm 22, 69 and 130, which give us words to express our grief. We search for the healing stories, where Jesus is more powerful than any disease. We focus on passages about the power of prayer, seeking to apply these to our own struggles. Above all, we look for words of hope, comfort, peace, joy and love.
Genesis 1-4 are full of God’s intentions for us and for the world. “In the beginning” God will eventually lead us to the affirmation “in the end, God.” We were created in the image and likeness of God, and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Not even cancer.
Questions for reflection:
- Where did you see God most clearly during the past Christmas season?
- What passages will you be searching for this coming year?
- Where do you see the best examples of God as creator?