May I wish you all a very Happy New Year for 2025. I do hope and pray that it will be a healthy prosperous year for you all.
As we look back on the year that is past, I am sure that many of you will remember news events, elections in Britain, the USA or Ghana. It may be that you look back on happier events in the life of your family such as gatherings for birthdays, anniversaries or Christmas celebrations. Some of our memories of 2024 may be joyful, others more painful.
New Year is also a chance to see the past in its context and move onto the New Year, 2025. It is about embracing new starts in life. There is a sense in which life is full of new beginnings which follow us throughout our lives, sometimes they come out of the blue, quite unexpected, sometimes they are planned and predicted, sometimes they are welcome other times they are not.
No one really knows what the year that lies ahead will offer us. The New Year can often bring a mixed bag of emotions and memories for many of us Some may have just experienced the best year ever and look forward to an even greater one ahead. Others may have just trudged through one deep struggle after another. The fresh calendar year brings desperate hope for things to be better, with an ache for the still-fresh wounds to slowly begin their process of healing.
Whether you have just walked through the greatest year of your life, or are incredibly glad to see last finally over, one truth still rings clear amidst it all. You are not alone. Not ever. The God we have found in Jesus Christ is a God of love. He will travel with us through all the events of our lives. He will be with us when we are happy and life goes well. He will also be with us when life is tough and challenging. Though things and people around us shift and change, our God never changes.
Let us see the New Year as an opportunity to rise above our worries and anxieties, to look at the strengths that we have in the churches of our circuit. May we be challenged to consider how better we can use our God given talents for the better of our world in God’s service. In the year that lies ahead, let us turn the Jesus who tells us in Matthew 11:28 ‘Come to me all who are weary and whose load is heavy, and I will give you rest’. So that as we enter this new year, we do so with the confidence to overcome our difficulties and embrace the opportunities as we look forward with hope and confidence.
Richard
Reverend Richard Grocott
(Superintendent Minister)
