1 It has been said that “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
2 The end of the old year offers an opportunity to look back and be grateful. We may even see some negative things in a better light, as we look back with the advantage of time.
3 Let’s pause to give thanks for what has been good, naming some of the people and events and circumstances of the past year…
(Pause…)
4 Dag Hammarskjöld, once the Secretary General of the United Nations, said: “For all that has been -Thanks! For all that will be - Yes!”
5 Let us pray:
God our Father, we give thanks for all that has been and, trustfully, we place the past into your hands.
We ask you to inspire us in the year ahead to seek and fulfil your will.
May we truly look on each new day as the start of the rest of our lives.
Enable us, with the power of your Spirit, to remain positive and confident, and live fully and joyfully with those people you have placed into our lives.
Lead us to bring out the best in one another that we may all grow as the as the people you call us to be.
Amen.
6 At the end of one year and the beginning of another, we appreciate that we have “moved on”. Yet, in another sense, we have returned to where we started. The poet, T.S.Eliot, writes: “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
7 Let us pray:
Lord, you call us not to get too set in our ways, but to be trustful and faithful, seeing the need for the on-going process of being renewed and re-vitalised.
Repeatedly you call each one of us to be ‘born again’, to start anew, to ‘repent’, to review priorities
and re-orientate the direction of our lives.
Give us the fullness of your Spirit that we may live as you would have us live.
Amen.
cf. Praying Each Day- http://www.prayingeachday.org/Dec31.pdf
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