Dialogue: Into a new year, one day at a time

As the last year of the 20th century ticks to a close and the first year of the 21st is about to begin, I wonder if we'll make any better fist of things - personally and as a community - in the New Year than we did of the one about to close. Faint hope.

So to those of you who are busy framing New Year's resolutions, I say forget it. The only thing that's going to change when the clock strikes midnight next Monday is the numbers on the calendar.

I gave up making New Year's resolutions when I was in my teens, mainly because every one I made - particularly the one about giving up drinking that sprang from the depths of a shattering New Year's Day hangover - never lasted more than a day or three at the most.

I have a tendency at this time of the year to take some time out to reflect on the year just past and think about what might be new and different in the next one.

But there's not much profit in it. What is past is past and while it might be able to be modified, it certainly can't be undone. What is to come remains hidden to us mere mortals and is known only to God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, the only person who sees the beginning and the end of all things.

Which is a very good reason to stay under his protection and care and to pray daily as he taught us, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" or, if you prefer (which I don't), the modern version, "Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil."

And never forgetting, "Give us this day our daily bread ... "

We all have before us as the New Year dawns 365 blank pages on which we will write the continuing story of our lives - a very good reason to live one day at a time. For all we have is now - all the rest is either history or mystery. I could be dead before I finish writing this column, or before it gets published, or next week or next month. There's no point in worrying.

In any case, God knows I have enough trouble coping with one day at a time without fizzing about the past or scheming for the future. Sure, like everybody I make plans. And, having made them, I simply do what I can today to see that they come to fruition - or don't, as the case may be.

Like our Christmas dinner, which we planned to have at the home of a couple who are dear friends of ours. But on Christmas Eve he ended up in hospital suffering from severe angina and probably won't get out until he's had a heart bypass operation.

(He should have been given that operation years ago, but like so many others he fell victim to that collossal and inhuman foul-up called "managed healthcare.")

So my wife and I ate a plate of savoury mince and Oamaru spuds for our Christmas dinner and enjoyed it as much as we would have turkey and all the trimmings.

Plans either work out or they don't. If they do, that's great; if they don't, that's okay, too. There'll be something else to do instead.

God is in control and the world is unfolding as it should, not always to my liking and generally beyond my understanding. I don't mind a bit. It's a thing called faith, which the biblical writer to the Hebrews defined so beautifully as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Lovely, that.

Then there's hope - and hope in God is the only hope worth having. He has never, ever let me down (though I've accused him of it a few times, I must admit). Hope in things worldly is unreliable to say the least. Look, for example, at the hopes most of us had at this time last year for life under the new Labour-Alliance Government. Pretty disappointing, that.

But it's only politics, and while its practitioners have the ability to affect our lives one way or another, they are transitory. And business sulks, exchange rate movements, house prices fluctuations, and economic cycles and their manipulators are of little no account in the eternal scheme of things.

So I will live next year as I have lived this one - one day at a time, a principle laid down most precisely in a ancient Sanskrit proverb that I reread every now and again to keep me on track. It says:

Look to this day,

For it is life,

The very life of life.

In its brief course lies all the realities and verities of existence:

The bliss of growth,

The splendour of action,

The glory of power.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision.

But today, well lived,

Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.


* garth_george@herald.co.nz