A New Year

The snow is white and crisp and clean. It fell all day, covering up the grayness of mid-winter. Tonight the air is so cold that it gives a kind of purifying shock to the lungs. The sky is black velvet clear with all those distant stars twinkling as bright as the Christmas lights reflecting on the icy walkways. The old year is now as gray and dull as the winter landscape was before the snow. Soon we will turn the calendar, learn to write 2009, look for a fresh start. May this year be like the cold brightness of this night, beautiful, erasing the old dinginess, giving us a sparkling landscape so pure and new that it takes the breath away. May we be able to begin again, right the wrongs we have lived into, turn our backs on the past. And may the bright shining stars light the way into a future where we learn how to be the best selves that we can be, our true selves, the ones who are made in the image of God.