I guess the best thing about any new year is not the resolutions we might write and subsequently falter completing. The best thing about a new year is the fresh start we can offer to ourselves. I look forward to completing tasks left behind by the culmination of 365 days of procrastination and avoidance. I feel a new vitality and invigoration about what I can do and realize as days pass slowly by, that what I have reluctantly not accomplished can still be accomplished. I envision the efforts put into the tasks on my list of things to do. This is not a bucket list or a honey-do list. It is a list of my own creation. My own ideas for what needs to be accomplished. My own thoughts and goals and aims for a new year.

So what is it I want to finish which I have not done so far in my life? Well, that’s a great question. Let me tell you I really have nothing earth shaking or life changing which would qualify for a major report to Congress or the State Legislature. Those political views I believe are best for me and, of course, the entire population of our country are of little consequence compared to the personal goals established by a lifetime of trial and error.

I have written a book. I think it’s pretty good. Other readers of my manuscript have encouraged publication. So I have a goal. I retired as a teacher last summer at the end of the school year. Now I can putter around the house and fix or design and build things to improve our home. Another goal is defined. I have a grandson in Silverdale and one in Virginia. I see Haiden often, but Lucas is across the country. Now another goal is required. Sandy and I have friends in varying areas of the world. Traveling with her is fun and exciting so another goal can be established (as long as the money doesn’t run short).

I guess what I am saying is that each day, each week, each month, each year is a new opportunity to institute a new, better, improved, beneficial set of goals, short term and long term.

I have gathered the last of my father’s sermons from my mother’s house. She willingly turned them over to me because she cannot bear to see them or read them.  It has been over 26 years since my father died, but the memory of his ministry remains strong as ever. I need to explore the sermons in depth and place them in this blog regularly. Oh! Another goal has been born.

I am not attaching a sermon to this issue of my blog for I have not read through any of the sermons for the last few weeks. I will be unavailable for this task for a couple more weeks. But look forward to reading what my father created over his 43 year career as a priest. I will be posting them by the end of January.

Take care of yourself and your family, be kind to friends and strangers alike, and get to know people more deeply than we usually care to try. The world can be a better place when, as Jesus Christ admonished us to do, we treat people as we wish to be treated, regardless of how anyone really acts to toward us.

God bless and Happy New Year!