It’s the one night when the world simply refuses to go to sleep! New Year is a time of fresh hope and anticipation; a time for a new beginning. We optimistically think, “maybe my situation will improve next year; maybe things won’t be so bad after all!”
But all too soon, it’s the week after New Year’s and reality begins to sink in. It’s back to work we go, back to traffic jams and matatus, to the job you don’t like or the boss you can’t stand. It’s back to paying school fees if you’re a parent. It’s back to living for the weekend. It’s back to the realisation that you’re probably not going to keep your New Year’s resolutions. It’s back to the brutal fact that our cost of living is only getting higher!
Depressing stuff isn’t it! In the middle of all this, it’s easy to — like mank Kenyans - pessimistic about 2014 or to dig in and brace ourselves for the worst. To shrug in despair and complain about the economy, the government and anything else we can think of. And yet the reality is that fear and complaining actually leave us in a much worse condition emotionally than before. In other words, our attitude determines our altitude!
So how do we develop a winning attitude about the year to come? Do we just close our eyes to reality and pretend that everything will be alright? Isn’t that what it means to have faith?
Far from it! That’s not faith, that’s bravado! Bravado is blustering through life, faking it till you make it. It is the blind hope that somehow things will magically work out. Some people confuse that with faith but they couldn’t be further from the truth!
The greatest antidote to fear is not bravado but faith. The difference between bravado and faith is the object of our hope. When we have faith, we gain in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, ‘the conviction that we are not alone in this vast, uncertain universe (and that) beneath and above the shifting sands of time, the uncertainties that darken our days, and the vicissitudes that cloud our nights is a wise and loving God. This universe is not a tragic expression of meaningless chaos but a marvelous display of orderly cosmos’.
True faith does not leave us with the illusion that nothing will go wrong but rather it instills in us the confidence to face our future regardless of what happens because we know we are not alone. As the good book asks, ‘the Lord is my light and my salvation, so why should I be afraid?’
Don’t let this be the year of fear. With God’s help, resolve that instead it will be the year of faith.
