The end of one calendar year and the beginning of another is a good time for me to look back and consider how I have grown through the year. That means looking through the blog posts of the past year and seeing what I have been thinking and writing about in 2012. After a quick perusal I came up with the following top-ten list. These are a few of my favourite posts in a, close to, tenth to first favourite order.
10. Our Time is a reminder of how grateful I am for the incredible blessings of my life. Thank-you Father for the place and time in which I live.
9. Don’t Miss Your Life is the title of a song that came out on Father’s day last June. It reminds all of us of the important things in life.
8. Prayer Changes Things is a bit of a confession that I am an experimenter at heart. The three styles of prayer represented in this blog show how I have spent a life-time in the laboratory of prayer.
7. Observation is all about science and the mystery of how God has put the universe together.
6. Contact is another excursion into exobiology and musings about the expanses of our universe. It reminds us that both theology and science must search for truth.
5. Dark Knight shows how deeply God has built self-sacrifice and resurrection stories into the fabric of our culture.
4. Adam and Genetics celebrates the completion of a degree and introduces a controversial yet widely held perspective on genetics and theology.
3. Higgs and Bosons pays homage to the biggest scientific discovery of the year and what certainly should have been the newsmaker of the year (contrary to what you will read about the Canadian Press newsmaker of the year).
2. Spiritual Inertia is short and to the point but reveals a quote that finally gave me the language to describe a principle of spiritual growth that I have experienced all of my life.
1. Pacing the Cage relates the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn’s classic song and reminds me that I can never rest on yesterday’s successes. Next year I will continue to seek to grow and develop as a person and a writer.
Together these blog posts show the spiritual journey of 2012 but there is one more event that has changed the man I am. This is also the year in which our first grandchild was born. He is certainly one of the best things that has happened to us in this year; and in our lifetime. Spending Christmas with him and his parents, cuddling his ten pound body into my shoulder, and praising God for his birth have been a beautiful way to end 2012. His small body reminds us of another tiny baby who came into the world with “fragile finger sent to save us; tender brow prepared for thorn; (and) tiny heart whose blood will save us.”1 May our memories of 2012 help us become the people whom God is calling us to be. Happy New Year.
1. Chris Rice, “Welcome to Our World.”