Many people look forward to celebrating New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.  On New Year’s Eve there are many parties and other forms of revelry, some to excess.  Here at Joy Lutheran, many of us will start the evening in fellowship at Carrabba’s.  Paulette and I enjoy watching the celebration in Time’s Square and watching the ball drop; of course, we have to record it just in case we don’t make it to midnight.  A friend once told me that for seniors, 9:00 is the new midnight. For most of us New Year’s Day is filled with the beautiful Rose Bowl Parade and lots of football; there are even special foods to eat such as `Hoppin John’. These celebrations, including some of the excesses, go back to the time of Julius Caesar and the introduction of the Julian calendar; it continued with its successor the Gregorian calendar.

New Year’s is not a Biblical holiday. The closest thing to it in the Bible is written about in Numbers 29:1: “On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the trumpets.” One time Billy Graham wrote about New Year’s in his newspaper column. He said that even though the holiday isn’t religious, it still shouldn’t be treated as just another day. In the spirit of Numbers he said that we should take time to look back on the year and thank God for his blessings. We should also look forward and commit ourselves into God’s hands. To me this sounds like excellent advice. Happy New Year! Throughout this New Year remember that God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim