Starting at the International Date Line, on a few small island nations, the cries of “Happy New Year” began to ring out, and then cascaded west through all twenty-four time zones, echoing in a multitude of languages all across the globe.
And yet, after all the confetti has settled, the cider and champagne have run out, and the glowing embers of the last firework have made their way to the ground, we all face the cold, hard reality that nothing at all has changed. The clock striking midnight has granted us no special powers to become the people we wish we were—sexier, smarter, stronger, richer, overall less miserable people than we were last year. The truth is that our New Years’ resolutions are nothing more than ordinary goals, just dressed up for the occasion, and we are no less likely to disappoint ourselves all over again.
The new year itself is no more than a line of demarcation that we as a civilization have arbitrarily chosen to embellish with hope and highlight with celebration. But it is in the end no more than a line, one of many we have drawn on the immeasurably expansive sheet of paper known as Time, in a feeble attempt to quantify it and get a sense of the velocity at which it is rushing past us.
And so when we wake up on New Years’ Day—hangover or not—and look in the mirror, we see someone who is very much the same person who existed on December 31 at 11:59:59 PM. The same you with all of your fears and regrets, all your deep hurts and secret addictions—all the things that you wish you could leave behind in 2017 are all still there staring you in the face. Here you are, with all your unfulfilled hopes and dreams, the same old empty places inside. And looking out the window, the scenery is very much the same, gun violence, climate change, political instability, natural disasters, and the threat of nuclear war, the same circle of life and death spinning endlessly on. There is nothing new under the sun. The ruins of yesterday are still here today.
It’s Newton’s first law, the law of inertia: A body in motion will always continue to travel at the same speed in the same direction unless acted upon by an external force. The law of inertia in the human dimension means that we too hurtle into the new year, unchanged by the powerless sentiments of “New Year, New Me!” and the like.
While we often hope that the coming of the new year is the ending of one chapter and the beginning of a fresh new one, with loose ends more or less tied up and text cleanly separated by the crisp line of a page, it is much more like a space between two words in a neverending feed of stream-of-consciousness writing. Or we wish that the new year would be like the ending of a symphony, with all of its dissonance resolving in consonance, followed by a brief silence, and then a round of applause. But the reality gives us no such pause. Instead, it is an endless score being composed, the new year standing only as the line separating two measures, no resolution or end in sight.
I myself entered 2018 in the same sort of liminality: in the thick of an intense game of Munchkin and with 51 pages of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 left to read, two uncanny reflections of the internal reality of things unfinished and unresolved, things that must be carried into this “new year” that feels very much like the old one.
Yet in the midst of all the things that remain in their dismal, misshapen state, there is one continuity that brings me comfort. Hebrews 13:8 tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” unshakeable by the passing of one year to the next. Every one of His promises that was true in 2017 will continue to be true in 2018. Every spiritual blessing that I have in Christ is still here in 2018. In a world that remains uncertain like shifting shadows at the tip of a precipice, I have a lighthouse atop a solid rock, a King who remains steadily on the throne. In the midst of a life that continues to be broken, I have a God who continues to redeem in His perfect time, unhurried by the rapid ticking of our clocks.
This is my hope, the only anchor that exists in the sea of meaningless sentiment and endless chaos. No new year, no human resolve possesses the power to stop the inertia of our mad rush towards death and destruction, to free us from the chains that we drag from year to year. Nothing does. Nothing but Christ. Christ who promises to make truly new those who trust in Him, in a process of continual redemption from our bodies that are hurtling towards death. God promises to bring to completion the work that has begun in Christ—the calming of every fear, the healing of every hurt, the cessation of every sin. Maybe not in 2018, or the year after it. Maybe not until the day I die. But I have this hope that my story will have a satisfactory ending, that the tension of my life’s symphony will end in resolution. For the Author continues to write and the composer continues to compose. He will not leave his work unfinished.
a cup of kimitea 