New Year's Day

New Year's Day. It's often a strange sort of day.

Not quite the 'morning after the night before' sort of thing, but a bit like that. Especially when the weather's as dreich and as damp as it's been today.

I don't do much on New Year's Day! I guess that's the bottom line.

I sleep a good bit longer (it was almost 2 in the morning before I got to bed, so I don't have pangs of conscience about a longer lie!).

I read again (it's a good, long book that I'm reading now and I'm happy to have the time to do the reading).

And I spent some time with family in the wider sense. My brother and his daughter will be heading off tomorrow back to Zambia, and it's hard on the heart to see them go. A brief two weeks back here (well, a few days more than that, I guess) is what they've had. And I get so used to having them around again - and then they're gone again.

The roller-coaster ride our hearts are often being subjected to is never all that easy! But it's been great to have had them back and seen them face to face and had the chance to catch up with their lives a bit again.

So it was good to have the time with them (and my sister and her husband, too, up from Wales again) - though hard, as I say, to say goodbye at the end.

Strange how strong these ties become. And lovely, too. I guess it's all the more the case since now both Dad and Mum are gone. But this is how it's meant to be and I thank God daily for it. These bonds between my siblings and myself.

How do I feel as I start a new year? A bit like the day itself, I suppose. A certain sort of heaviness upon my heart.

The damp, dreich, misty drizzle of the sorrow in my Mum being no more there as this new year begins. The memories of what those childhood New Year's Days were like. The sense of time going on. For the first time in my life I start a year an orphan. Which sounds kind of melodramatic!

But New Year's Day is a marker of sorts. Another sort of milestone on the road. Another harsh reminder that the days are marching on, the staging posts of life are slipping by. It brings some pretty basic truths right home to me.

And so, as well, it serves to give an urgency to all the days ahead. There's often that sense about New Year's Day. The tidying up that's done. The sorting things out.

The psychology's strange! But very real.

I mean, it's just another day at one level. And yet it's very much a milestone of a day as well. Hence this strange, instinctive sort of need to put affairs in order. A chance to start again. A chance to get things back in focus once again.

New Year's Day becomes for me a sort of deep, deep breath I take. Filling my lungs with the air of the Spirit of God. Taking the time to get my bearings right again.

And ready for all of the challenges coming months will bring.