Auld Lang Syne

The whirlwind is about to start.  It feels like that blur of stars as the Millennium Falcon enters hyperspace or the Enterprise goes to warp.  It's going to be 2013 before I get to take a breath again, and the new year is going to bring a lot of changes, so I think it would be good to take a minute to reflect on the year that was.
First, let me say this to 2012: good riddance.  I don't feel this way about every year, in fact, there are some that I would have liked to last a little longer, but by any standard that I can imagine at the moment 2012 was one of the worst years on record.  However, I will try to find some good in at least a few aspects.  First on a micro level, I enjoyed reasonably good health.  I didn't have any diseased organs removed or find out I had any new diseases (that was for 2010, the year we were supposed to make contact).  To the bad, there was more than enough earthshaking personal tragedy in our immediate context to give 2005 a run for its money (that was the year my brother Jonathan died, just to give you some idea of the scale of sadness we're talking about here).  There was a tragic accident where an Amish boy died in my neighbor's silo, followed a week later by a triple homicide where a father killed his two little girls and his estranged wife (and I had been counseling them, and the family attended the church where I'm the pastor and I had to do a triple funeral), then as the icing on June my neighbor's sister suddenly passed away at 34, leaving two little kids and a stunned family behind.  I put that all in one sentence because it happened in a three week span.  I didn't even mention another tragedy in the community involving a domestic incident where an estranged husband shot his father in law in the neck (that was bad too, and it happened one day after the triple homicide).  Pardon me if this is starting to read like some sort of cruel joke, but that's actually what it felt like.  At the end of the summer a really good man from my other congregation rolled a tractor on himself and left the world a little poorer for his absence.  Finally, after Thanksgiving we had to have our chocolate Lab, Maggie, our good friend of almost ten years, put to sleep.  Amidst all this local and personal stuff there were the national tragedies in Aurora Colorado, a mall in Oregon and an elementary school, a freaking elementary school, in Newtown Connecticut.  That's why I say to 2012: Good Riddance!
But let's not leave it at that, because that would let the darkness win.
Let's move on through this mess into something hopeful shall we?
First word: Peace.
We need some peace.  We need peace in our hearts and minds, we need peace in our families, our communities, our nation and our world.  Are earth shaking tragedies going to stop?  No, but that's precisely why we need peace.  We need peace that does not depend on external circumstances.  We need peace like an Amish man, who had just lost his 18 year old son, had when he came to console the man who had been working with him when it happened.  We need peace, like the strange inexplicable peace that I felt when I stepped into the pulpit to proclaim the resurrection behind the caskets of two dead children and their mother.   We need peace that can face the rage of the void and say: "Be Still!"
Second word: Enough.
We live in a world that never has enough.  Part of the reason why tragic things happen is because we never have enough.  Some of us honestly don't have enough, some of us are threatened every day by a sense that everything we have will be taken away.  Some of us just don't have enough time.  But, truth be told, most of us have too much and it's eating our souls.  Some people have too much because they take from others.  Some people have too much because they just can't learn to say, "no more."  But for the people with a little or a lot, enough is an important word.  It's a word we need to learn to say with more frequency, clarity and conviction.  Unless we get a grip on the concept, the reality will be that we will never have enough.
Third word: Trust.
What is happening in our world right now is a failure of trust.  Nations don't trust each other, factions and political groups don't trust each other.  Often times, families don't even trust each other.  I would say it's a failure of love, but I know thanks to Wendell Berry that "we must love where we cannot trust."  We can love someone in the abstract, but trust is a personal thing.  You either trust someone or you don't, you can't really help it very much.  Some people seem to be trusting by nature, not many, but some.  For most of us though, it's rather an uphill slog.  I've loved certain people I did not trust, but I've had a hard time trusting people that I already love.  The most tragic failure of trust is the fact that we, as a species, and even as a segment of of our species that pursues a quest for God known as religion, do not trust God.  We'll give it lip service, but when the rubber hits the road, we would rather do it ourselves than have to trust God.
If there's one over-riding good lesson that 2012 has taught me, it's trust God.  This year taught me that by putting me so close to the chaos of the void that I had no choice.  It put me so close to a situation where children were harmed that I could not, simply shrug it off and move on.  2012 has given me the faces of two little girls that are never going to grow up and have lives, which is a sadness that I will carry for a long time.  It has also forced me, as a pastor, a father and a human being, to trust that those faces and those lives are in the everlasting arms of God.  I must trust that.

May old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.
May old acquaintance be forgot, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.