Besides college football bowl games, New Year’s Day is most closely associated with New Year’s Resolutions. Starting a new year with a fresh calendar and maybe a new journal, too, we make plans—or rather, we make “wishes”—to do some things differently. This year we’ll lose the extra weight the crept up over the years. We’ll quit a bad habit. We’ll begin an exercise program,  join a gym (Gyms, by the way, love this resolution because they know it is “easy money”.  This resolution seldom makes it to Easter but the monthly fees continue for the whole year!)

We may decide to take a class, earn a foreign language, travel or spend more time with our families. And there is always the broken relationship that needs mending.  We make these resolutions with the best of intentions, but in the words of Mary Poppins, they are often nothing more than “pie crusts promises; easily made and easily broken”. (It strikes me that only Mary Poppins found pie crusts “easily made but that’s another story”!) What we are really wanting to do is become better.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on habits lately and here are a couple of key things that I learned. Getting rid of an old habit or even creating a new good habit is not simply a matter of will. Because nature abhors a vacuum one habit has to be replaced with another one. Secondly, if the new habit is too large, hard or overwhelming, it will not stick. We have to start small. One recent podcast used the example of flossing your teeth. If you want to develop the habit of flossing your teeth, start with flossing just your front teeth for a few days. If you decide to do more, fine, but let the habit build slowly so that your “memory muscles” will kick in and flossing will become unconscious. If you are going to learn to play a musical instrument, don’t start by saying that you will practice an hour a day. Begin with fifteen minutes or ten or five as you build your mental/ emotional muscle memory.  The same is true of going to the gym. Begin by just going to the gym! Once a week, twice a week, whatever you can do over a period of several weeks.Once you’re there, you might as well do an exercise or two. The key establishing new patterns. So take baby steps.

I believe that there is one habit that is key to becoming a better you. That key is developing spiritual depth. The gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus was in the habit of going to worship. It seems that He prayed before every major decision, and presumably before not so major ones that are not recorded in the bible.

Spiritual depth includes worship, prayer and generosity. As with all new habits, start small. Resolve, for example, to worship with a faith community at least once a month. Look for a faith community that is not just comfortable but one that stirs you from comfortable complacency. Don’t follow a preacher but the One to whom the preacher points. If necessary, take a sabbatical from one faith community and visit another but don’t neglect this aspect of your life.

Develop the habit of regular prayer. I end each day by silently saying a little prayer when I turn off my bedside lamp at night. Sometimes it is the Lord’s Prayer. More often, it is the same one that my parents taught me and that I taught my children and say with my grandchildren. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” I begin my day with a prayer of thanksgiving for whatever will come next.

Develop the habit of Generosity. “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow” the old doxology says. Generosity is key in developing a sense of thankfulness and the real stewardship of life. As with the others, start small. Leave a tip that is larger than you ordinarily would leave. When an offering is taken, don’t reach for the “least coin”, be generous. Step it up a notch. When visiting someone, always bring a gift. It doesn’t have to be large. Simply bring a card, a handwritten note, a flower, even just a warm greeting or blessing.

By developing these spiritual habits, all other habits will become easier. We will break the bad ones, replace them with good ones and become our truer self–the one God calls us to be.

“I bring you tidings of great Joy”, the angel told the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth. Tidings of Joy not Happiness. Happiness is fleeting. Joy is not. No one can make you happy.  Nor can things. People make us happy until they disappoint us. Things may make us happy until the next generation comes along. Or unto “buyer’s remorse”‘sets in. Abraham Lincoln once observed that a person is about as happy as they make up their mind to be.  Happiness is dependent upon feelings.

Joy is not dependent upon feelings. Like the other gifts of the Spirit–Hope, Peace and Love–Joy is a gift that surpasses understanding. Joy can creep into our lives in the midst of sadness or grief. Joy gives us the strange sense that “everything is going to be alright,” even when circumstances tell us that things will never be alright. Joy trumps fear.

Joy is serindipitious. It comes unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere.  The shepherds were simply going about their business, minding their sheep when the angel appeared to them followed by the heavenly hosts. Joy, the angel said, is found in the birth of a child, the Child.

May that Child touch your life. May you know Joy.

One of my favorite stories on Peace begins, “Once upon a time…there as a king who sought a painting that would instill a sense of tranquility, even in the most difficult of times. Sent sent out an edit announcing a competition throughout the land for someone to produce such a masterpiece. The reward, a king’s ransom, stirred the imaginations of artists everywhere.

Finally the great day of unveiling arrived. The king reviewed all of the submissions and narrowed his selection down to two. The first was of a glassy-smooth lake reflecting passing clouds and green trees on the bank a under bright blue sky. A flock of sheep grazed nearby.

The second painting was of thunderous waterfall crashing and foaming angrily. One could almost feel its cold spray. Overhead were stormy-gray clouds, flashing lightning, wind and rain sweeping the landscape. But nestled on the cliffs of the falls was a tiny tree clinging to the rocks. In one of one of the branches, though, was a mother bird. Sitting peacefully she rested on her eggs. With her eyes closed and her wings ready to cover her little ones, she embodied the peace that transcends all earthly experience. This was the painting the king selected.

The apostle Paul wrote about such peace that is found in Christ.  Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplications with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace that passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (4:6-7)

Peace is an inner quality, a serenity, that allows us to face any situation with the calm assurance that God is present, that somehow God will work things out, not necessarily according to our will, but to the Almighty’s.

So, in this season of Advent, may the peace that passes all understanding abide in your heart.

My wife and I learned nearly 25 years ago our family’s life is much nicer if we simply invest in a “cleaning lady” every couple of weeks. We’ve second guessed our decision a few times and always regretted the decision “to do it ourselves.” Inevitability our family peace, happiness and harmony suffered. Now, there is a down side to having a cleaning lady or service. We have to “prepare” for her visit. For my wife this means “tidying” up so that the cleaning lady doesn’t think that we are a family of slobs. For me, it’s spending 5 to 10 minutes on the day she comes putting things away—or, more accurately, hiding them. This is not because I am afraid of what she will find. Nor is it because I would be embarrassed by anything that she would find. I’ve just learned that if I do not “hide” things the cleaning lady will “put it away” and it will take me hours, if not days, to guess where my stuff may be! It’s kind of like an adult version of “hide and seek”.

John the Baptist was a voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord…make his paths straight. Fill in every valley, level every mountain, straighten out the crooked path, and make the rough places smooth. (Luke 3: 4b-5)

So how do we prepare ourselves spiritually in this season of Advent?  I believe that it begins with not taking ourselves so seriously and taking Christ more seriously. In one of the gospels John the Baptist said that he, John, must decrease and He, Christ, must increase. In other words, “Less of me and more of Thee!”

Between now and Christmas Day, why not get prepared by starting your day with a very simple prayer; “Lord, what would You have me do today?” Implicit in this little prayer is an attitude of “not my will but Thy will be done.” Go ahead and make your “To Do” lists. Plan out your day. But be prepared for a surprise because I truly believe that God may have a different agenda in mind for you today… or tomorrow.

Over the last three months I have had more people ask me to pray with them as they shared their concerns for the future. First there have major employment shifts in our local economy as a key employer downsized. Then there were the recent elections which, believe it or not, have not been the most divisive that our nation’s history. States have not threatened secession nor has one congressman caned another on the floor of the House of Representatives, but, we do live in anxious times.

This period has been described as a time of free-floating anxiety in which we look for the quick fix, the knight in shining armor, the easy answer, the silver bullet, the magic pill.  In his newest book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age  of Accelerations, Thomas J. Friedman wrote that we live in an age of accelerating cross currents of technology, globalization and climate change with a measure of biodiversity thrown in for anxious seasoning. These forces are transforming the workplace, politics, ethics and our sense of community.

Thomas Friedman is not the first to suggest this. For example, Edwin Friedman in his posthumously published book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, noted that we are in the midst of a period of gridlock characterized by an unending treadmill of doing the same thing over and over only trying to do it harder, accumulating more and more data hoping that it will show us what to do to end our  seeming stagnation. What we need to do, Edwin Friedman wrote, is reframe the questions facing us and eliminate false either/or dichotomies.

The late Phyllis Tickle observed that every 500 years or so, Western civilization and the Church goes through a wholesale rummage sale when many old ideas are discarded in order to make room for the new world that is being born.

Yes, these are anxious times. But this is not the first time that people of faith experienced  anxious times. Isaiah 2: 1-5, one of the readings for the first Sunday of Advent was written against the backdrop of anxious times. When it was written the northern Kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Damascus were trying to persuade the southern kingdom of Judah into an fatal alliance against the Assyrian Empire. Jerusalem was under siege and King Ahaz turned to the prophet Isaiah for advice as well as reassurance. I’m not sure how reassuring Isaiah’s words were because they did not contain a quick fix. Nor did the prophet offer a silver bullet. Rather, he told the king that no matter how bad it looked now, the day was coming when God’s reign would be seen by all people. Isaiah knew that God’s temple was not really on Mount Zion or in the holy city of Jerusalem but in the hearts of God’s people everywhere.

Armed with this vision the prophet was able to say with confidence that the day would come when “They will beat their swords into iron plows and spears into pruning tools. Nation will not take up sword agains nation; they will no longer learn how to make war.” (2:4)

“Come,” the prophet continued, “let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

We light a candle of Hope, audacious Hope in the face of anxiety,  because we know that the One who came as Light into the world of darkness is still bearing His light in the hearts of all who dare, who are audacious enough, to take him seriously. Thy Kingdom will come on earth, as it is in heaven is more than a nice wish. It is a promise.

Often late at night, when I wake up and am all alone with my thoughts, I begin to pray about the random things that come and go in my mind; people, events, images, places, things. Sometimes I try to figure things out but I quickly become exhausted. That’s when I wonder what God thinks.

Here are a few of my recent random thoughts that that I prayed about: Omram Daqneesh, the little brown haired, mop headed boy who stared out at us as he sat in the back of an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble of an apartment building in Aleppo.  You remember the picture.The left side of his face was caked with dried blood and dirt; the childlike shocked wondering look in his eyes. In video clips he wiped his brow with the left hand, momentarily stared at it before innocently wiping it on the seat cushion. The stain and the horror, though, could not be wiped away that easily.

I pray for the moms and dads in cities like Chicago who say prayers with their children as they tuck their children in bed at night to the background noise of gunfire. I pray for the parents whose children never come home and are forever taken from them. I pray for teachers who want to teach but also need to be social workers for students who are afraid to learn  because peer pressure pulls them down to the lowest common denominator.

I pray for the under-emploied and the unemployed, for those who have given up hope and for those who never had hope planted in their hearts i the first place. I pray for those who dream and those who are afraid to dream. I pray for all of us as we seem to worry about just taking care of our own. I long for the bygone day when selfishness wasn’t seen as a virtue and the government wasn’t the punchline of a joke. It is all so wearying.

I have a confession to make. Not too long ago I wrote a prayer for God–not to God, but for God. I wrote it in my journal. I don’t know if anyone ever thinks about praying for God. For all I know, it may be some kind of heresy. After all, God doesn’t need our prayers, right? Nor has God asked for them, at least as far as I know. But still, something inside of me stirred the urge to pray for God. I don’t think that it did any harm. It even did me some good. And who knows, maybe God found it amusingly refreshing to have someone pray and not ask the Almighty for anything.

Yes, I keep wondering what God is thinking when he looks at the world, when he hears any of his children cry.  Someone once asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied that a neighbor is anyone who needs your help. I wonder if Jesus was thinking about the story of  Cain and Able when God asked Cain, after he killed his brother Able, where Able was?  “How should I know?” Cain retorted. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Well, in a word, yes; yes, you are your brother’s keeper. We are connected to each other whether we like it or not. Jon Donne had it right when he wrote that no one is an island. We are all a part of the main. And, all children are our children.

There are certain decisions that we make in life that haunt from time to time. One such image for me is occurred on a cold December day when my wife and I were in downtown Chicago. We stayed at a hotel on Michigan Avenue and agreed to meet friends at an Italian restaurant within walking distance of our hotel. Walking to the restaurant I passed a homeless man sitting, alone with his head resting on his arms and tucked between his bended knees. He had a tattered blanket draped over his head and shoulders so that no one could see his face. He had no sign asking for money, no cup, and no bag that I could see.

At the restaurant I ordered my “go to” Italian meal—spaghetti and meatballs.  A few hours later I walked out of the restaurant with a take-home bag. And then, there was the man. He hadn’t moved from his spot. He was in the exact same position as holiday shoppers crowded the sidewalks. I sat my bag of leftovers beside him without saying a word feeling fairly self-satisfied. But then, we hadn’t gone a half of a block before I began to question what I had done. I left him a bag of leftover spaghetti and no utensils. Why did I do that? Was it to ease my conscience? Did I do it because I wanted to do something but didn’t know what to do? My act costs me nothing but I imagine that the benefit to him was commensurate to what it cost me!   And then I got to wondering, “Was he my Lazarus”; the one who sat outside the rich man’s gate? Was I the rich man in Jesus’ parable?

We are trapped by a system that allows us to believe that we are somehow disconnected from “the other,” “those people,” “the different.”  We label “them” thus taking away not only their humanity but ours as well.

If we are brave enough, humble enough, we can ask God to help us free ourselves from the broken system in which we are trapped, a system not of our own making, one that we have simply inherited and built upon. And, if we are lucky enough, if we are willing to persevere, we can experience the saving,  renewing, and freeing grace of God.

And that, my friends, is a glimpse of grace.

While on a recent flight we passed through clouds and encountered more than a few bumps. The pilot told us that he was going to try to go above the troublesome clouds. Seat belts buckled, for a few moments passing through the clouds was like we were going through a thick fog with dips and bumps. Eventually, though, the clouds thinned, the ride smoothed out and we could see blue sky above the clouds. Above the clouds, the sun shown brightly.
Passing through life’s dark clouds is scary. The bumps, bruises, and setbacks life hands us can be discouraging, even unsettling. We can lose our way, our balance and even our faith. But that doesn’t change the fact that above the darkness, above the storm, above the clouds  the sun still shines. God’s love for us is constant.
That is one of the promises that Jesus gives us…”I am with you always, even until the close of the age.”

Several years ago my newest son-in-law asked me if he could marry my daughter. We have a rather archaic tradition in our family, one that I must admit I started when I asked my wife’s father if I could marry his only daughter. Both of my sons-in-law asked me if they could marry our daughters. It takes a lot of courage. Of course I know that I could never say “no” because by the time I am asked, the question is merely a formality. My newest son-in-law, though, was taking on a bigger challenge, and he knew it.

You see, my daughter has a son by a previous marriage. He has two daughters by a previous marriage. As a minister I know that blended families can be tough to pull off no matter what the circumstances are. For several years I served as a “male figure” to my grandson as his mom balanced being a mom and a career. He became my  Monday “shadow buddy” spending the whole day with me.

One evening my soon-to-be-newest son-in-law called me and asked if we could have a “boys” lunch the following Monday. The place where he worked was closed for a federal holiday and my grandson did not have school. It would just be the three of us.  “Sure”, I said, “I’d like that. Where should I meet you?” He named my grandson’s favorite restaurant.

We ordered our food and then he got  down to “business”.

“I want you to know that I love your grandson. And I love your daughter. I want us to be a family. Do I have your permission to marry her?” I hadn’t expected this but it didn’t come as a surprise, either. What did come as a surprise was the way that he asked. “I love your grandson and I love your daughter. I want us to be a family.” It was a trifecta! No father or grandfather could ask for more.

I remember in John’s gospel that Jesus once told  his disciples that whoever loved him would also love those whom he loved. The statement begs the question, “And who does Jesus love?” Answer, “Those whom God loves”. “And whom does God love”?  Well, John 3: 16 and 17 tells us,  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have eternal life. God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him. (my emphasis) Followers of Jesus are called to love those whom God loves: each human being regardless of where they live, whether they are rich or poor, “one of us” or not, the color of their skin, the language they speak, background from which they come, their politics or even their faith tradition. Each one of us are created in the divine image, sons and daughters.

This Love is not easy. It is not about feelings but a matter of the will. It has been said that there are three elements to love; Passion, Emotion and Will. We cannot have Passion 100% of the time. Nor can we feel an Emotional connection 100% of the time. Passion and Emotion are only partially under our control. But our Will, our Will is another matter. We can decide to act in a healthy loving way 100% of the time. The problem is that we just choose not to. Too often we allow fear and worry and public opinion to sway us.

As followers of Jesus we are called to a new way of life, a better way of life, a life that both glorifies God and enjoys God forever. We are called to a life of Love.