It’s a new year! I wish I could say I spent last night praying it in, but I went to bed at 9.30pm and not even the fireworks could rouse me! Still, I’m hoping to find time for my annual habit of reading back through last year’s diary to get a picture of what God might have been trying to say to me. I first did this about ten years ago, when I wrote a diary twice a week or so with whatever I felt I was learning spiritually. I felt slightly sheepish to find that I was learning the same thing about once a month, with complete surprise each time.

Learn from my mistakes – here’s something worth trying. In our house group in the past we’ve taken turns to tell each other our ‘spiritual journey’. This involves sitting down to prepare a talk of no more than ten to fiteen minutes, describing your life with God so far. It is not just how you decided to follow Christ – in fact you don’t even need to have made that decision to tell your spiritual journey. It’s looking back at your life so far and noting your questions, searches, struggles, successes, and mistakes, and how God may have been guiding and answering you, perhaps even from early childhood to the present.

The difference between this and telling the story of ‘how I became a Christian’ is that it reflects the truth that our lives are a journey. The Old Testament is full of journeys with God, from Abraham to Jacob to Moses and the Israelites in the desert. For us, that crucial moment of turning to Christ was usually somewhere in the middle of an ongoing story. We can’t stop the story there; it’s unlikely that we could conclude ‘I became a Christian and then I lived happily ever after.’ More likely, that was the point that God rolled up his sleeves and really got to work on us. All of us, as we prepared our short talks, had moments of ‘Aha! That’s what was going on!’ as we recognized patterns in what God was teaching us. He still is.

So, where did you go last year on your journey with God? Did you recognize that it was a journey, or did you keep wondering why you hadn’t arrived yet? Were those setbacks really setbacks, or essential for the rest of the journey? And are you ready to shoulder you pack for another year?

Hmm. Of course, we are still on holiday, so I’ll get back to the journey after my next cup of tea.

Happy New Year!