New Year’s Eve is always a big moment. The various and numerous celebrations captivate all our senses. For years, since my youth in the 1940’s, I have tried to stay awake and watch the new year come in at midnight. Times Square has always been a huge and iconic venue. Since TV started to broadcast that enormous gathering, my eyes have been glued to the screen. Secretly, I always wished that I could be in that privileged crowd, waiting for the year to become brand-new. But now, in my 80’s, I sit on my sofa, wondering, “Where would you go to the bathroom? Do they have any? Or are you expected to go before you come?”
In retrospect, what does it matter if the year becomes new but I do not? What does it finally matter at all that I flip the page of the calendar but fail to flip my life around? What does it matter if, with the birth of a new year, I manage to remain the same- old same-old? What does anything matter if I refuse to give up bad habits, bad thinking, bad behavior? The obvious answer to my rhetorical question is that it doesn’t matter at all.
And so, through the passing years, I have tried making my New Year’s Eve resolutions. I promise the Lord that I will do better, care more, and be more loving. The problem is that I generally lose my resolve within days. And I can always rationalize my moral slippage saying to myself and to the Lord, “I never really meant it anyway.”
Today I understand that none of us can remake ourselves. Only the Lord can remake us. He is waiting to do just that for you.
Remember the poem “Humpty Dumpty”?