ready to serve

There’s something melancholy about New Year’s Eve.

Partly it’s the fact that Christmas is done, the family reunions and time off a thing of the past. Where I live, we’re looking at months of cold days and long nights, grinding through the winter. But also, there’s this feeling that another year of my life is gone, and sometimes it seems like I didn’t do much with it.

Tomorrow starts a new year. Instead of parties, I’ll be thinking of goals. There’s a lot on my plate for 2016.

So I look once more to the life of Jesus, to that time when the miracle baby of Mary and Joseph crossed paths with the miracle baby of Zechariah and Elizabeth.

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ Jesus replied, ‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then John consented.” Matt 3:13-15

There was a lot on Jesus’ plate too, but in this passage I see him getting ready. Oh, he didn’t need baptism the way I did, but just as he was brought to the temple as an infant, and returned as a young boy to meet the requirements of the law, he now turns to John to carry out the new forms of grace.

Jesus doesn’t say he’s above all that. Jesus carefully did what was expected of righteous men of that day, and modeled the relationship with God that baptism marks.

As I get ready for 2016, I pray that it will be a year of effective ministry, through this blog, through the opportunities to fill pulpits, through my work operating paint plants. And I look to Jesus, who carefully attended to his relationships with God and with people as the foundation of his ministry.