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‘Eat less sugary and fatty food, exercise more often, spend less time dealing with emails’…these are the beginning of a list of resolutions that run through my mind at the start of a new year. Will I be able to keep them? Time will tell. A 2023 poll from Forbes Health found most people in the USA give up resolutions after less than four months. It can be hard to break habitual behaviours and wholeheartedly embrace change. Perhaps one of the problems with resolution is our starting point. Are we coming at these from the wrong place?

In a recent article from The Guardian (2nd January 2025) Moira Donegan comments that “seeking out a new year resolution is, after all, itself often an unhappy exercise in appraising yourself and finding yourself wanting.” From the locus of a modern, secular, feelgood, you-gotta-learn-to-love-yourself-no-matter-what therapeutic mindset, finding fault with our selves might be considered unhealthy or even neurotic. But from a biblical perspective, identifying our flaws and shortcomings can be a necessary starting place for embracing truth and discovering the goodness and abundant forgiveness of God. I have found the best starting point in honestly facing my limitations and seeking guidance to be a daily prayer time that includes the reading of a Psalm. These ancient Hebrew songs are full of honest searching, struggle and comfort. They hold up a mirror to the soul, encourage us to think beyond the ‘same old’ and glimpse, with our inner eyes, a hopeful spiritual horizon. I commend them to you.

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37: 4)

Happy new year.

Rev’d Philip

In 1849, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts named Edmund Sears penned the carol ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’. He wrote this during a period of uncertainty and unrest. Sears was concerned about the social divisions erupting within his country, about the terrible human and moral toll of slavery and growing talk of an impending war between the states. His concerns were realised years later when the first shots of the American Civil War rang out in April 1861.

His poignant carol guides us to look to the skies and listen to the song of the Christmas-tide angels, singing a song of hope and peace and goodwill to a world that seems deaf to this music.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing.

As we move through the Christmas season together; as we come to services of worship and celebrate with our families, let us also take the time to pray for places in our world torn apart by war and violence. Let us pray that the harmonious music and message of the angels may ring out loudly, hushing the noisy and vengeful ‘men of strife’ and enabling people of goodwill to seek that just and lasting peace made possible by the one we call the Prince of Peace.

Rev’d Philip