It's Lonely at the Bottom by Lorraine Triggs

I had convinced myself that I was the only mother at church whose adult child wasn’t working, following the Lord, dating a wonderful Christian, or moving into his first home. At Good Friday services, forget contemplating the cross shrouded in black cloth, all I contemplated were happy parents surrounded by equally happy adult children, accentuating my aloneness. It was lonely at the bottom.

According to a guest essay in the New York Times, it turns out that I wasn’t special in my loneliness. The essay, titled, “If Loneliness Is an Epidemic, How Do We Treat It?” (Eleanor Cummins and Andrew Zaleski, July 14, 2023) stated that one-fifth of Americans over 18 always feel lonely or socially isolated.

If loneliness is an epidemic, then it can be treated as a clinical problem. Behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo (no stranger to loneliness herself), has been moving away from investigating a “pharmaceutical solution” to loneliness and, according to the essay, is “now promoting the acronym [are you ready for this?] GRACE, which stands for ‘gratitude, reciprocity, altruism, choice and enjoyment.’”

As Christ followers, GRACE spells out a different solution to loneliness which is long past the epidemic stage. I suspect it began in the beginning in the garden when our first parents experienced dissonance in their communication with the Creator. And Grace shows up with promises and fig leaves.

Ruth was a swirl of emotions—loneliness probably in the mix—when she threw in her lot with her bitter and lonely mother-in-law. There, Grace shows up in worthy Boaz, turns bitterness to blessing and then enters the kingly line of David.

Even King David wasn’t immune to loneliness and despair. In Psalm 6, he languishes, his bones and soul are not just troubled but greatly troubled. He starts to see Grace but is overwhelmed and exhausted with his moaning, tears and weeping. Ah, a perfect backdrop for Grace who shows up in the darkness and night as if they were bright as day and hears David’s cries and prayers.

After David and after 400 years of silence, Grace shows up again, this time in bodily form, as the only Son from the Father. I don’t know if this is what Dr. Cacioppo had in mind when she suggested that a lonely mind might be healed with help from the body, but we are healed because the Son’s body was broken for us, because his wounds brought healing to our souls, because his body was raised.

God’s redemptive, healing Grace also shows up in body that breaks bread together, that thanks God together, that does “nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility counts others more significant than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3) and looks to the interests of others.

A funny thing happened to me at the bottom of my loneliness. When my husband told our small group about some of the issues with our adult child, it turned out that everyone in our group had someone they loved with the same issues. Suddenly it was very crowded at the bottom as we cried together, prayed together and made room for Grace, make that more grace, ever even more and more grace as we lifted up each other and found rest in the One who was lifted up for us.

Get Better by Wil Triggs

A couple weeks back we taught the Kindergarteners from Acts 5, Annanias and Sapphira. The curriculum went off in the direction of generosity, but we couldn’t really do that. The two of them had lied.
 
I don’t remember the specific incident that took place in my grade school class, but to my mind, it was so horrible that I absolutely could not go to school the next day. Was it a threat from a schoolmate? A test I wasn’t ready for? I don’t remember, but I was convinced that It must not happen. I prayed that I would wake up sick.
 
In the morning, I convinced myself that my prayer was answered.
 
“I feel sick,” I said to my mom.
 
She had a full-time job. My older brother was the only other sibling in the house, but he was a letter carrier and had left for work hours before. My dad was gone. It was just me and her. I had no idea the stress my being sick caused my mom. I didn’t care. I was focused on not going to school.
 
My mom put her hand on my forehead. She held it there. “You don’t feel like you have a fever,” she said. I remember thinking she didn't sound too sure about that.
 
She paused, touched my forehead again, left the room and returned with the thermometer. She shook it and checked the mercury to be sure it was down where it needed to be, then put it in my mouth, under my tongue. Mom left me there on the couch and went into the other room to continue getting ready for work.
 
As soon as she left the room, I took the thermometer out of my mouth and peered at it. You had to turn it just right to read and I couldn’t do it, but I knew that thermometer had to go higher than normal.
 
I glanced at the lamp by the couch. Well, was I going to try it or not? No, I shouldn’t, but soon it would be time to go. Quickly, the thermometer touched the lightbulb. I wasn’t sure how long to hold it there. I took it off and tried again to read it. No luck. I put it back on the light snd heard her coming. I didn't want to burn my tongue, but hearing her footsteps, the thermometer jumped back in my mouth.
 
Mom took the thermometer out of my mouth. She looked at it, looked at me, felt my forehead, then said, “You can’t go to school today. You need to stay home and get better.”
 
Phew. What a relief.

She figured out my lunch and made sure I was comfortable on the couch in the living room in front of the television. I lied there, my head on the pillow she brought and allowed her to drape a blanket over me.
 
 “Don’t answer the door if anyone comes. Call me on the phone if you need anything. Your brother will be home first.”
 
“I know,” I answered, convincing myself that I must really be sick, my voice slightly trembling.
 
She kissed me goodbye and headed off to work.
 
The morning went well. I watched TV shows I usually only saw on holidays. Lunch was canned chicken soup with saltines and an orange. Even at that age, I could boil water, so there was tea with sugar, which was what I always drank when I felt sick or cold or sometimes just because.
 
But as the afternoon came, gameshows were replaced by soap operas. I wasn’t interested, so I turned off the television. I started to think about what I had done.
 
My brother came home. He had things he wanted to watch on television, so I went to my room. I had a book to read, but it wasn’t any good trying to read my way into someplace else.
 
Whatever it was that I avoided at school that day was still going to be there the day after, and now I had to face it with the added layer that I lied to my mom and would have schoolwork to make up. It would have been over if I had gone to school, but I did feel sick. I kept trying to convince myself, but it was not the kind of sick that had anything to do with staying home from school to get better. The kind of sick that couldn’t be healed with soup and rest. I had lied to my mom. Lying was wrong. I was wrong.

This was worse than whatever I was trying to avoid at school. The bad thing wasn’t at school. It stayed home with me. There was no escape. When you pretend to be sick and aren’t really, there’s no way to get better on your own.
 
I prayed. I asked Jesus to forgive me.
 
My bedroom was in the back of the house right by the driveway, so I could hear the car pull in and mom open the car door. A few seconds later I heard her unlock the back door and step into the back entry, then into the kitchen.
 
She came to my room. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
 
“Better,” I said, lying again. “Mom…”
 
“What?”
 
“I didn’t really have a fever.”
 
“I know.”
 
“You did?”
 
“That thermometer was so hot you would have been dead or in the hospital, and I certainly would have been able to feel a fever that high.”
 
“But you let me stay home.”
 
“I figured if you wanted to stay home that bad, you shouldn’t go to school.” She hugged me. “But don’t ever do that again.”
 
I hugged her back. “I won’t,” I said. She asked me what I had done to get the thermometer so hot. I told her. Someone had told me about the light bulb trick at school.
 
I never did that again.
 
Would she have let me stay home if I had told her why I didn’t want to go? Possibly. And I would have had a much better afternoon. Long forgotten was the potential incident that made me want to stay home—but, here I am now all these decades later remembering the bad choice I made.
 
Whatever I feared at school was not as bad as what I did at home to avoid it. There is no pulling the wool over the eyes of God. Like my mother on that day, the Lord Jesus already knows.
 
Annanias and Saphirra lied to Peter to make them look better than they really were. I lied to my mom to make myself look worse than I was. God is not fooled either way. Lies are childish things. Grace and truth are the medicines that makes us get better.

For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. John 1:16, 17

Ashes to Ashes by Lorraine Triggs

Ash Wednesday collided with Valentine’s Day this week. It has probably happened before, but as a junior higher, I was too busy exchanging Valentines and conversational candy hearts to notice. If I did notice anything on Ash Wednesday it was my friend’s excused tardiness to school and the smudge on her forehead.

“Why do you have a smudge on your forehead?” I asked.

“It’s not a smudge. It’s a cross from the priest,” she explained. “It’s Ash Wednesday.”

This was not a day on my Baptist church’s calendar. “Ash what?”

“Ash Wednesday. You know, the beginning of Lent.” Not on the calendar either nor did my friend elaborate much. “For 40 days before Easter, you eat fish, not meat, and give up candy.”

When I asked my mom about this apparent gap in my Christian upbringing, she replied, “We’re Baptists. We don’t do that.”  Since I liked candy and didn’t like fish, I was relieved that we Baptists didn’t do Ash Wednesday or Lent.

On Thursday, my friend would come to school smudge-free, and life went on as usual at Helen Keller Junior High.

In college, when Ash Wednesday became a thing among evangelicals, I had friends who pulled back their hair to make sure everyone noticed the ashes on their foreheads. Another apparent gap in my Christian upbringing that Lent was a season of show and tell. Or maybe my friends simply forgot what the priest said when placing the ashes on their foreheads; “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I know better now that neither my junior high friend nor I—and not even my ash-proud friends—could ever make ourselves smudge-free. Sin leaves its smudges and prints on our hearts, turning lives into ashes, and returning us to dust, to death.

Perhaps the practice of giving up something for Lent (and I hope more than candy or meat by now) is to make Jesus’ death on the Cross more relatable or to satisfy that impulse of ours to do something for our salvation. But how can we relate to the Cross, when it was Jesus, who knew no sin, was made sin for us? What Lenten sacrifice of mine will add to the lavish grace and mercy God showed us in Christ?

English Nonconformist Isaac Watts may or may not have shared my inclination of answering rhetorical questions, but he did, however unintentionally, this once when he wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

It’s not only the 40 days leading up to Easter that we should survey the wondrous cross but also the other 325 days of the year, overwhelmed with thankfulness that we who were dead, left in the dust, were made alive in Christ.

Audible Gasp by Will Triggs

I’m telling the children in Kindergarten class the story of Hudson Taylor over the course of several weeks. I started a couple weeks back asking the kids what they do after dinner if they’re having family time.
 
A lot of them said that they would watch a movie and eat popcorn.
 
I explained to them that when Hudson Taylor was a little boy, there was no such thing as a movie. The room responded with an audible gasp.
 
Not only did they have no movies, they had no screens to watch movies on. Blank looks of shock.
 
Not only that. They didn’t have electric lights. Their home was lit only by candles. The thing we do when we lose power, light candles.
 
But it was that first revelation that seemed to shock them the most: a world with no movies.
 
A key part of my growing up years involved going to the movies. My wife attended a church that didn’t allow its members to go to the movies. She could watch them when they moved to television, so it must have been something to do with the act of going to a movie theater.
 
But for me, movies held a special place in my childhood and student years.
 
In college, I discovered the arthouse theaters, smaller and more rundown than the big movie palaces downtown or the up-and-coming multiplexes with multiple screens. Going to the movies in the arthouse was like watching a graphic novel—watching and reading at the same time, seeing another part of the world.
 
I remember watching a black and white subtitled movie that ended with the protagonist’s revelation of his own failures and a sense of peace. The silence of us viewers, stunned as we sat collectively, and thought of a life not lived well and about to end. When the movie faded to black, ours was not a gasp but just a sort of sad sigh, yet we all did it together.
 
Just like the Kindergarteners did together, with their audible gasp of shock when they thought of a world with no movies.
 
Or the shared experience of laughing out loud at a joke at the same time as a hundred other people you don’t know.
 
The dark room of flickering lights. Opening nights in a theater with fans can bring cheers, screams and much applause as the long-awaited premiere begins or when strangers in a dark room discover for the first time the unthinkable—Darth Vader reaching out to Luke and saying “Son.” Audible gasp!
 
A shared experience with those around you in a theater makes it different than a streaming service you watch alone, different from watching alone but more like, going to church every Sunday.
 
Journeying through the Bible with others in church is like the shared religious experience of moviegoing, only better. A genre-bending epic love story with sci-fi horror elements featuring the living and the dead, a small personal film where I sometimes need to read subtitles to get it.
 
Sunday comes and there I always go to gather with my friends and the people I don’t yet know. We sing together. Where else can you do that? A man will get up and talk, yet not his words but the very thoughts of Christ. There will be a nugget of gold, hidden in pages of solid rock, soaring out across the room, penetrating my soul. Prayers will go out and up to places I could never reach alone. We will sing together again. It can get personal fast. A man who knows me well might ask about my son. Another is just back from a hospital stay, and he looks remarkably well. We meet new people. We greet old friends we haven’t seen in a while. On the way out, I stop and pray with a friend. There we were in the parking lot, together, reaching the hand of God for help. Sometimes we just need help, right then and there. Prayer is prayer, but praying together is different than praying alone.
 
Back to movies, I remember hearing someone once ask, “What if Jesus comes back and he finds you in the movie theater?”
 
I know now that I was supposed to feel shame, but at the time, I didn’t understand the question. Maybe I still don't. If Jesus came back, when he comes back, who cares about the movies or anything else? Wherever we are, Jesus finds us snd will find us.
 
No matter the kind of week I’ve had, I am welcome in church. Last week I took off my shoes and shirt and put on a sort of turban and robe. Pretending to be Peter just released from jail, I asked the children if I should still tell people about Jesus even if it might mean going back to jail. Yes, they said. It was a hard answer, yet they knew it was right. I was touched these little ones hesitantly answered yes.

We call out to the Father, the Son stretches out his arms on the cross and then to the sky and finally reaches out to us in love, the Spirit there, ever-present guide and friend. At church, I’m reminded he is already here with me, with us, in church or cinema or work or home. Wherever we go, he goes. Yes.
 
Anywhere else, with me and us, church and Jesus with us, every day, all night, closer than I dare dream, dear church, Jesus appearing in our midst. In the tempest on the sea he walks on the ocean ground to us, Is it a ghost? At moments we realize and see through the glass and we can’t help it—gasp—for what he is and the who and what is to come, the best place to be, he stays with us. We stay with each other, this boat against the roiling waves, an ark in the roiling storm, a ship in which Christ calls out “Peace. Be still.” And we catch our breath in the wonder and awe and breathe the audible gasp of the great peace of all he brings.

Still.

The Race to the Heat Registers by Lorraine Triggs

Cold Michigan winter mornings, two living room wall heat registers and three girls. You probably can guess this isn’t going to end well.

On these cold mornings, my two sisters and I would race to claim one of the registers, but as the youngest, I found the odds were stacked against me, and I would be left out in the cold. This would lead to accusations: That’s unfair. I got here first. You shoved me. You had it yesterday. Mo-m-m.

Ironically, we were racing to the heat registers so we could have a cozy spot in which to have our quiet times, our daily devotions.

The great race to the heat registers reminds me that I wake up selfish most mornings. My first thought now, as it was then, is of me—my comforts, my priorities, my way. I certainly don’t need any blogs or Wirecutter tips on self-care, which I manage to do quite well on my own, thank you very much.

Selfishness and its close cousin, pride, ought to be daily reminders that we’re “frail children of dust and feeble as frail;” instead, they remind us of our achievements, our greatness, ourselves. Each of us has something in which to take pride. The out-of-fashion word “vainglory” came to mind, so I looked up Philippians 2:3 in the King James Version: “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than themselves.”

Merriam-Webster defines vainglory as “excessive or ostentatious pride especially in one’s achievements.” No wonder the word has fallen out of linguistic favor. Though not an attractive word, it is an accurate description of the human condition—much like what the psalmist David wrote, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5) And in sin, we wake up vaingloriously. We don’t wake up planning to sin, we just do as the day goes on.

Seriously? Vainglorious? We’re involved at church, we give our resources—time and money—to God’s work, we follow the right people and podcasts. Sure, there’s the occasional sin, but we’re good people compared to the truly evil people out there.

I pray that I never become such a good person that I forget my frail, dusty origins, that I forget the Lord’s benefits of forgiveness, healing and redemption. May I never become confident in my own righteousness that I no longer see a need for his mercy, his grace, his abounding steadfast love and compassion. May I never outgrow a humble dependency on Jesus who redeems, renews and one day, will restore all things to himself, including frail humanity.

The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.  Psalm 103:8-14

Reverie 121 by Wil Triggs

I first heard about you when I was five. My sister told me of you in such a natural way. You made such sense that I couldn’t believe I had not already figured out the wonder and truth of your love. It seemed so right but I could not have found you without someone else telling me.
 
At the same time, the playgrounds of childhood were calling. There were four square, football games on the blacktop, imaginary games based on television. Fistfights with good friends—on the grass, never in the street. You were with me, but I can’t say that I was always with you. Life marched on. There were board games that I rarely won. I sold stuff, real or imagined, to people, real or imagined, to benefit myself or my Cub Scout pack or school or the Red Cross or UNICEF or some imaginary world-changing charity.
 
I didn’t exactly forget about you. But there were other things.
 
There was my seventh-grade best friend’s mother, who always had a rice cooker on when I would go over after school to shoot hoops. She never failed to offer us a sample of the evening meal. I remember lumpia, a food I had never tasted before, but tasted like food from home, a home that was mine, but one I had never lived in. Sometimes I stayed for the whole meal. This was the beginning of my interest in other people and cultures and foods that seemed unusual for a picky eater like me.
 
The rice from the cooker and the lumpia and me and the family I didn’t know well—and you were there, the other guest at that table.
 
Sometimes I played records on the stereo, a box version with a lid on which to play the 45s. Everything that poured out of those speakers seemed real and magical at the same time. I never wanted just the single 45. It seemed like a waste of money to get only one track when you could buy an LP and get so much more.
 
You were listening to the music with me back then..
 
And then I learned to play music myself, and it was the same thing—real and magical. Scales and drills, over and over, big bands and pit orchestras. To play the music I had once only listened to was revelation. Often, I thought that this music going into me and coming out of me was somehow truth flowing from you in a way that made me feel closer to heaven than hell.
 
Were you enjoying the music back then?
 
I was growing up. Things were getting hard. There were demonstrations. Teargas and gas lines. Teachers in my public school offered condolences when my grandfather died. Adults outside my family showed me they cared—which was a shock sometimes. When pretense was dropped in favor of care, a teacher became a multi-dimensional human, more than an authority, another human being. It was better to learn from them afterwards.
 
You watched me filing the music after school, looked after me when I ran sprints after class with Motown going through my mind. Band teacher. Track coach. You were there.
 
It wasn’t only people who helped me. Words became friends. In writing I found a path where I could know what I was thinking and feeling. Words helped me to try and make sense of what was going on in me and my friends, in the world, underneath me, all around me, words to sort things out. I rose to the top and sank to the bottom at the same time. Words became what people could not—ever present and able to tell me where I was. Friends along the way.
 
Those notebooks I selectively showed only a few pages to a friend here or there—you read them all.
 
I became aware of my own imprisonment, the sins and limitations that increasingly seemed to define me in ways that I didn’t understand. The world seemed slanted to make me want things that you would not want. Voices were saying that if I did a certain thing, you would bless me, belittling the truth that when I was not blessing you, you came.
 
Sometimes I ran to solitude with my beloved words, and I wrote. You saw all of them, surely. But they weren’t enough. These friends did not leave me, but they could not atone or transcend or forgive.
 
I lifted my eyes, realizing the insurmountable, inescapable place with little gods and distractions everywhere. Hell stood before me on that path I didn’t know.
 
No people or words could provide what I needed.
 
From where does help come when I am in this prison of fallen failure and falsehood?
 
There is only one answer.
 
When you came to me in prison, it was confusing at first. How could you be there alongside me. In this isolated place, a prison for the lost, where you for sure did not belong, you came.
 
The prison door opened. You told me to walk out. You had to tell me to walk out the door you had just opened otherwise I never would have walked out.
 
But you could—the Word could, the one Word, before and above all others. The spoken word-maker of heaven and earth came to my lone cell. There was blood and pain that I could not comprehend. You spared me that and yet it was there. Nothing is more immediate than the pain of broken flesh and blood. There we were. Creator and created being. You the Word and the person, lifting me, guiding me.  At your table I never deserved a space, yet you pulled out the chair and bid me to sit. So, sit I did and do still.
 
How can you be so close, so now, so much more the teacher and friend, the balm I need right now.
 
When my foot was stuck in a crag, you freed me to walk. You set things right.
 
Living in the darkness of the sun and the lightness of the moon, I found rescue. You put things right.
 
When I had breakfast week after week with my friend after his mother died and before my father did, you were there with us.
 
You are the lifeguard that never sleeps, ever watching, day and night, the waters and tides we swim.
 
Always coming, going, these characters, words, tunes, going in and out so much of day and night. But in it you are always constant, the unwavering word that never flees, never forces, ever loves.
 
I am a fish you caught. You keep me. I’m a keeper. You never cast off.  You are the keeper of everything. Artist. Singer. Chef. Lawyer. Savior. Companion. Doctor. Neighbor. Nurse. Patient. The one who builds the fire on the beach and invites me to come, eat.
 
From this time forth and forevermore.

Everyday Experiences by Lorraine Triggs

Though I considered it, I did not bring my dog to church last Sunday. If I had, he may—more likely not—have helped me define the word “gentleness” as we taught the children about the fruit of the Spirit. The Spiritwasat church with me and helped me define that fruit, especially when no theologian seemed up to the task of explaining the fruit of the Spirit to Kindergartners.

“Pretend you got a new puppy or kitten. How would you hold it?” I asked the children. I held my imaginary puppy in my hands and stroked it gently. “I’d be gentle and calm.” I looked out to see the 20 or so Kindergarteners one by one joining in to pet their own puppies and kittens in their arms as we talked about gentleness—restful, quiet because we know Jesus and trust his promises.

Puppies, kittens, fruit—everyday human experiences that help explain the Spirit’s (comforter, helper, counselor) transformative work in us.

I was in a small-group Bible study recently, when a friend commented that her brother thinks the whole Bible is a metaphor. I think there was an audible gasp. Unless her brother was misusing the term to imply that everything in the Bible is untrue, his comment was accurate in a way he did not intend.

The psalms pile on metaphor after metaphor for God: rock, fortress, deliverer, shield, stronghold, refugee, shepherd, light, a very present help, strong tower, and so do the gospels, especially John’s. In the first chapter alone, Jesus is word, light and lamb. In other chapters, Jesus is bread, light, door, shepherd, vine, the way, the truth and the light.

In his book A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible, Leland Ryken defines metaphor as “a comparison between two things that asserts that one is the other rather than simply like or as the other. The assertion ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ (Ps. 23:1) is a metaphor. At a literal, grammatical level, a metaphor aways states an untruth: God is not literally a shepherd.” Lee goes on to say that metaphors are an “invitation for us to discover how A is like B.”

In some respects, we are so comfortable with these metaphors that we simply accept them at face value, and they can lose their profound beauty.

I think it’s time we accept Lee’s invitation and rediscover who Jesus is.

​He is the bread of life, who held up a piece of bread and told his disciples to “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Jesus, the lamb, who held up a cup, and said, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood . . .” (Matthew 26:27)

Declarations 2024

On this other side of New Year’s, I have shifted from “best-ofs” to reading of the hopes and predictions for the new year. No one knows what’s going to happen in 2024, so these kinds of lists are much less reliable than the year-end ones that look back on what actually took place.

Last year I spent more time than ever in the land of podcasts. On one I listened to last week the regulars on the show reviewed what they predicted about 2023 a year ago. They had gotten most everything wrong. They laughed about it, and it did seem funny. We humans seems so uniquely gifted at getting these things wrong, and then being impressed with ourselves for trying. So, what did they do next? The exact same thing for 2024. Why did I listen when they were so off about the last? 

Another podcast debated making resolutions at the beginning of the year. For the most part the participants didn’t own up to making them. But then they confessed to doing their own versions of resolutions, just not tied to January 1. I noticed, too, that many of them looked to liturgical calendars or selected monastic practices to help give shape and discipline to their days and nights. Though some Christians I respect draw inspiration for daily discipline from places as unlikely as the Islamic calls to prayer at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and after dark or monastic hours of prayers, which seem to follow similar patterns. I rebel against much of that formalism and repetition.

That kind of thing seems pretty self-absorbed, though I realize in saying this that I’ve likely lost a good number of my friendly readers who love the rich aesthetics and rhythms the liturgical calendar provides, or just like making resolutions anyway. Maybe my saying these things makes me just as self-absorbed as everyone else. Oh well. It’s January.

But as I look ahead to 2024, I’m not interested in predictions or resolutions. If I lose weight, start swimming, write more, become socially engaged in an issue or election, good for me. But not best for me.

And I do want to spend more time praying and in communion with God. While on earth, Jesus withdrew to the quiet place to be alone with God.

Jonathan Edwards wrote resolutions for himself as a young man that he reviewed once a week to see how he was doing. It’s a comprehensive list. Maybe I could try for three of my own but what might they be?

Best for me in 2024 is a declaration or a proclamation or two, not about me, not about the world. I want this year to be a year to more clearly and fully declare God. 

After all, if the heavens declare the glory of God, can’t I, too? Or will I just go on thinking about who is going to win the football game or the election or the newest competition show on my favorite streaming service. The declarations are revealed in the things I do, the words I say, the way I act to the people who are not like me, who may not like me. 

My declarations will have to be simple enough for a Kindergartener, not graduate school theological phrases that impress the enlightened few. These declarations are for everyone.
God is trustworthy.
God is good.
God is near. 
God is here.
Father, Son, Spirit.
Jesus came. He died. He rose.
He reigns.

And this from our Bible study in the Book of Acts:
Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. 

This is a new year’s declaration I can get behind. It doesn’t matter if I’m in shape or out of shape, keeping my resolutions or already broken them. My life in 2024 can declare this truth, this freedom found only in Jesus. 

Let these simple but eternal declarations control me in new ways this year.