I feel like the days are just flying by at this point, dear readers.

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind and hasn’t stopped since the holidays. Christmas was a beautiful time of family and friends, and we greeted the New Year with joy and thanksgiving for what is to come. I hope your holidays were just as bright and full of peace and love.

Since we’ve begun 2019, I’ve really been pondering Life, The Universe and Everything, as Douglas Adams wrote. If you don’t know what I’m referencing, look up the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series by Mr. Adams. “Life, The Universe and Everything” is one of the books in the series. 2018 was quite a long year with a multitude of changes, all of which have led up to this very moment where I am writing to you from the comfort of my favorite squashy chair.

The future, a kind of daunting void that is shapeless in my mind at the moment lingers ahead, almost like a velvet curtain that could be concealing so many different things. Maybe it’s a pleasant surprise. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? I guess that’s part of the fun — not knowing what lies ahead.

However, two things have given me comfort when I start to think too much about what the future holds:

1. God knows how everything is going to go and He’s got a plan for the end game.

2. My pastor shared this past weekend that God doesn’t make all new things — He makes all things new.

The first part is so comforting because it means all of this really isn’t up to me. Thank God — because I would not do nearly as good a job planning out my life and my kids’ lives and my husband’s life. Thank God that he knows what he’s doing and I don’t have to try to hold it all together. God is walking beside us down a path he created and knows so well.

The second part is equally as great because I don’t have to be shiny and new for God to love me. Rather, God, in his goodness and grace, takes us as we are and makes us new, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the answer to a lot of my New Year’s resolutions.

I think that’s what we all strive for when we come upon a new year — a new way of being, a new way of seeing the world and a new way of seeing ourselves. Here is the perfect opportunity, my friends, to take that big step into something new this year — it’s not a fad diet, it’s not a killer workout regiment and it’s not a membership to a health club — but the changes you’ll see in yourself are everlasting.

Salvation is not a resolution to keep trying at until maybe someday you’ll attain it.

No, my friends, it’s right there waiting for you — just a prayer a way.

Let’s make the word of this year “new” — a new life, a new hope and a new plan for the future.