‘Happy New Year’ is the wish of a thousand greeting cards and a multitude of personal messages.
It’s an expression of friendship, or aspiration and hope, not at all to be despised. But what would a truly happy 2012 look like for a disciple of Christ?
First, we have to remember that the New Year concept is a construction, to enable us human beings to make sense of time. In one sense, January 1 has no more significance for a new start than any other date on the calendar. But in Scripture, from the very beginning, God divides our human experience of time into days and weeks, months and years, in part to enable us to build in rhythms and patterns, to make sense of our human existence on earth. ‘He has put eternity into men’s hearts’ (Ecclesiastes 3.11), so that we can understand something of the concept, but cannot grasp its reality, because we are creatures bound by time.
