This was written on New Years Eve 2019 - although it is being posted on the first day of 2020.
The last day of the year, of the decade is here. A friend told me recently that our lives change incredibly every ten years. It has certainly been true in my life. The pivotal highlights of each of my last decades are arriving in a Northern England hospital; going off to my beloved English convent boarding school; moving to Texas to work for Lady Bird Johnson’s radio station; falling irrevocably in love with Jesus in a large London church, starting their Creative Ministries Department, then moving back to America to do my masters degree; my prison chaplain years; followed by a decade of Storytelling. They are the hooks on which the joys and sorrows of each ten years are hung.
To finish out this decade and until August I’m working in my local hospital as a Resident Chaplain. Just today I’ve comforted a woman about to lose her second husband, laughed uproariously with septuagenarian identical twins who regaled me with tales of people confusing them over the years; and prayed, at different times, with a couple of people who were terrified by an upcoming medical procedure. All that, and much more, before lunch. Each day is dramatically different. You never know what it will bring - except for fascinating stories that I’m weaving into a new Storytelling show - “Chaplain Geraldine rides again!”
It is a good way to round out the last extraordinary decade!
Whatever your last decades have brought you, may this new one be full of hope, light, grace, and love.
For all of us.
May we all have the courage to overcome our fears, and become all we were created to be. May we become the fullness of our true selves - and accept and love who we are. Finally.
May we live out the rest of our days fully alive. And may the love and grace that we discover within us spill out and one by one change our world.
And how do we get from here to there?
Ah! I’m glad you asked.
For it is now to the part of this day where I can’t help myself!
Every New Year’s Eve I post the the same poem. No matter what is happening in my life, the country, and the
nations, I find it to be relevant, comforting, and inspiring. And so have many other people over the years.
In the dark, uncertain days at the end of 1939 after Britain had declared war on Germany, King George V1 quoted the poem in his Christmas speech to the Empire. (It was taken from a longer work called "God Knows" penned by an academic turned missionary, Minnie Louise Haskins in 1908. More recently, the words were spoken at the Queen Mother's funeral in 2002.)
"And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
"Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown!"
And he replied:
"Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way"
In this coming year, and decade, through the loving power of the Ancient of Days, may hurting hearts be healed. May long-awaited promises be fulfilled. May hope push out despair. May we dance often, and with passion. And may new doors of heart-soaring opportunity be flung open for all of us. Amen!
Happy, healthy, prosperous New Year and New Decade to all my family and friends.
