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Year-ending, Year-beginning
Elizabeth O'Connor
Use New Year's Eve or New Year's Day as a time of reflection
on the year gone and the year to come:
What took place in your home relations? Your work relations?
Your church relations?
What events in the larger community of city, country and
world most captured your attention?
Who were the significant people in your life? What books and
art instructed your mind and heart?
Did you create anything this year? Did you make any new
discoveries about yourself? How were you gift last year to a person, a community
or an institution?
What was your greatest joy in this year gone? What was your
greatest sorrow? What caused you the most disappointment? What caused you the
most sadness?
In what areas of your life did you grow? Were these areas
related to your joy or your pain?
What are your regrets? How would you do things differently,
if you could live the year again? What did you learn?
Did you have a recurring dream? What theme or themes ran
through your year?
Did you grow in your capacity to be a person in
community--to bear your own burdens, to let others bear theirs? Did you have
sufficient time apart with yourself?
Did you root your life more firmly in Scripture? Did you
grow in your understanding of yourself? What was your most important insight?
Did God seem near or far off?
How do you want to create the new year? What kind of
commitment do you want to make to yourself? Your community? To the oppressed
people of the world?
How do the questions about commitment make you feel? Angry?
Challenged? Hopeful?
Who are the people with whom you would like to deepen your
relationships in the year to come? Do you have relationships that need to be
healed?
What can you do to heal your own heart? What can others do to assist in
your healing?
Is there a special piece of inward work that you would like
to accomplish? Is there a special outward work? What are the goals that seem
important to you?
What are your hopes? What are your fears? What are the
immediate first steps that you can take toward the goals that seem important to
you?
We might have a time of prayer in which to give thanks for
all the events of the year gone, and to ask that the God through whose fingers
they were filtered will continue to bless them to our use. They are now the
bread of our life--part of all that we have to share with another when we share
what is ours to give away.
Source: Letters to Scattered Pilgrims
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