As you read this you have already lived the first few days of the New Year of 2023! In saying that I want to wish everyone a very blessed, prosperous and joyful New Year!

At the beginning of a New Year, people will always say you: I want to wish you a prosperous New Year. Some of the definitions of the word prosperous are: Successful, Thriving, Happy, Flourishing and so forth. All these definitions are exactly what most of us want or desire in any New Year that comes along.

The problem with any New Year that comes along, is though we know there will be great times in that New Year, there will be very difficult times as well. Death will take place in 2023. Pain and sadness will take place in 2023 and so forth. I don’t want to sound so bleak but that is the reality of life in any New Year.

I love bright, sunny days, with very little wind and just the right temperature outside, but who doesn’t. The truth of the matter is that we need the rain for our crops to grow, the snow for our lakes to be full, the wind to blow away all the pollution in the air and so forth.

It never seems to fail the moment you plan for something that will take place outside, the rain or wind comes along to mess up your plans and we immediately start complaining about it, or at least I do.

A New Year also means we will be one more year older and getting old doesn’t isn’t always what it’s said to be. Our body begins to ache in places it never did. Our hair begins to turn a color we don’t like or it disappears. We can’t do what we once were able to do or we do it much slower than we once could. We work so we can one day retire and enjoy life, only to find that when we retire, we are too tired or not able to afford what we thought we could do in retirement.

Ok, enough of all the bad things which can and may be take place in any New Year. What lessons did we learn in the previous year, in those cloudy, dark, cold, trying times we experienced? As believers, did we see the Lord’s hand holding us, even carrying us in those cloudy, dark, cold very trying times in our life?

As a pastor, I am required to visit people in the hospital and pray for them and I have come across some of the most positive, encouraging, yet very sick Christian people in hospital beds.

I have discovered the reason these people are so encouraging and positive in the midst of being very sick or even close to death is that they have learned the spiritual lessons in their lives when difficult times came and they saw the hand of the Lord deliver them.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left the bedside of a very ill precious Christian person in the hospital who learned the spiritual lessons the Lord taught them in their previous times of struggle only to discover I was more encouraged as I talked with them than I was to them as I prayed over them.

Want a prosperous 2023?? Look back at what the Lord did for you in 2022 in your difficult times and take those lessons into 2023. Wishing us all a very prosperous 2023!!!