How Are You Spending This New Year’s Eve?

Yet another year has come to an end and a new one is about to begin. New Year’s Eve, a day that holds such significance for so many people around the world. How are you going to be spending it this year?

Will you be with throngs of people outside somewhere, waiting for some object to descend from its perch?

Will you be at home with someone you truly love, having a quiet evening together, while watching the festivities on television?

Will you be with friends at a party somewhere, playing games, drinking, and enjoying food?

Will you be at the movies or seeing some other type of performance somewhere?

Will you be at a casino gambling, hoping to score big before the next year begins?

Will you be out at some bar or nightclub, dancing and drinking the night away?

Or will you be one of those who won’t even stay up till midnight because you really don’t care much for the final holiday of the year?

I ask these questions because sadly, I don’t remember much of what I did on plenty of past New Year’s Eve’s.

I know that six of them were spent totally drunk and high. At least a dozen or more were spent chasing after someone for sex or love. While a bunch of others were filled with massive depression and doom and gloom.

The fact is, I lost count of the number of New Year’s Eve’s where I wasn’t really present at all, where instead, I’d awake the next morning and regret not only the prior evening, but also the majority of the previous year.

I lost count of the number of New Year’s Eve’s where I made pledges, resolutions, and promises to myself that the upcoming year was going to be filled with me accomplishing x, y, and z, only to see none of it come to fruition by the time the next New Year’s Eve came and went.

And I lost count of the number of New Year’s Eve’s where I avoided doing that which could have been such a beautiful evening, instead doing something else altogether that was far from uplifting.

Thank God, I feel so differently this New Year’s Eve.

I feel so differently because I didn’t live my life in any toxic addiction this past year.

I feel so differently because I’m not ending the year with serious regret.

And I feel differently because frankly, I lived the entire year doing my best to follow the love of Christ and to serve God.

In doing so, I enter the next year with some hope and joy, two things of which I haven’t had much of in so many prior New Year’s Eve’s. Where my life heads next though, I don’t know, as when following God, one really never knows where their path will lead next.

Nevertheless, I end this year with gratitude. Gratitude to God for all the healing that’s taken place within me thus far and gratitude to God for knowing that at least on this New Year’s Eve, that how I spend it really doesn’t matter. Because as long as I am with God and God with me, I know however I choose to spend the evening, that it will be special in its own unique way and exactly how God intended it to be for me.

Happy New Year’s Everyone…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson