Another New Year

Good where we’ve been,
good where we’re going to.
Good where we’ve been,
good where we’re going to.
      — sung refrain, unknown author
 
Dear Disciples,
‘Tis the season for end-of-the-year lists and resolution making for the new year to come. Spotify quantified my listening habits, with #SistersinLaw topping my podcast list and Engelbert Humperdinck crooning my most played song (A Man without Love, if you want to know. Thanks to Marvel’s Moon Knight TV series for the ear worm.) Barack Obama has published his popular Spotify music playlist, along with his favorite films and books of 2022.

We love lists! There’s a list for most human endeavors: best film lists, top TV shows, biggest political stories, most influential people, and more. The Los Angeles Business Journal publishes a list of lists, a compilation of the lists published during the year.
Perhaps it’s a way of closing the books on a previous year. We manage to get the last bits of the year stashed into a stuffed file folder, tucking it away and promising to look at it again soon. All the while we know once the file drawer is closed, time will slip by and the folder moved to the back of our memories.

I am a sporadic list maker, returning to the practice when life’s details threaten to become unmanageable. Often lists are boring—the grocery list scribbled on the back of a receipt or a packing list for my suitcase. Sometimes lists are for a future dreaming—creating Pinterest boards of places to travel, restaurants to dine at, hikes to try.

There is a poetry form of lists, and the first one I remember reading was Shel Silverstein’s marvelous poem, "Sick." In it little Peggy Ann McKay offers the reasons she cannot go to school that day, reciting an impressive list of her ailments:
..."I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more—that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?...

Have you made any lists for 2022? —moments of accomplishment, tasks left unfinished, or roads not taken? A compendium of joys or heavy griefs? Are you carrying into the new year a moving box filled with unnecessary regrets or grudges? What can you take with you into 2023 and what will you allow yourself to let go of?

My favorite contemporary hymnwriter, John L. Bell, in the song, Take This Moment, uses the list poem form as a prayer to God for new beginnings. You can listen to the song on YouTube.
Take this moment, sign and space; take my friends around;
Here among us make the place where your love is found.
Take the time to call my name; Take the time to mend
Who I am and what I've been, all I've failed to tend.
Take the tiredness of my days; Take my past regret,
Letting your forgiveness touch all I can't forget.
Take the little child in me scared of growing old;
Help me here to find my worth made in God's own mould.
Take my talents, take my skills; Take what's yet to be;
Let my life be yours, and yet, let it still be me.
—John L. Bell, (Take This Moment)
​
Whatever lists we are carrying from this year to the next, may the grace of God always be our companion on the way.

---