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Hymn Reflection:
Come, Us Anew Our Journey Pursue”
At the end of the year, many of us will just roll right on through; we’ll celebrate with fireworks or noisemakers and never look back. A few of us will take a moment to review the twelve months prior, and we might remember the “best of” moments, compiling them into a “Top 9” Instagram post or including them in a holiday letter to family and friends. We might take time to recall holidays and vacations, birthdays and awards, as well as lost loved ones and difficult trials persevered.
But how often do we inventory the prior year in terms of God’s call on our lives? How often do we offer the prior year to God and try to see it through God’s eyes? What if we were able to hear from God, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? What if God could gently show us the opportunities in which we might have shared love or taught peace but didn’t, as encouragement and challenge for the future? What if God could point out the times that we allowed ourselves to be conduits of the Spirit, allowing deeper discipleship and even transformation to occur as a result, helping us to see the ways we’ve been faithful, and the ways that have made a difference in the world?
In Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Come, Let Us Anew Our Journey Pursue,” he wrote:
O that each in the day of His coming may say,
“I have fought my way through; . . .
I have finished the work thou didst give me to do!”
O that each from his Lord may receive the glad word,
“Well and faithfully done! . . .
Enter into my joy, and sit down on my throne!”1
Perhaps that might be the hope with which we look back on this past year: that we might be able to say, “I did the work God gave me to do,” and we might each hear from God, “Well done—now enter into my joy.” What a gift that would be! Take time today to examine the year just past for joys and sorrows, for faithfulness and missed opportunities, and offer it all to God, listening for God’s response and encouragement.
And at the same time, for most of us, the end of the calendar year is not the end of the work God has given us to do for our lives. So in addition to looking back at how and when we’ve served God in the past year, today is also a time to look forward and ask God for the strength, humility, and conviction to love and serve God fully in the year ahead. Earlier in Wesley’s hymn, he wrote:
Come, let us anew our journey pursue,
Roll round with the year, . . .
And never stand still till the Master appear.
His adorable will let us gladly fulfill,
And our talents improve, . . .
By the patience of hope, and the labor of love.
As we look ahead into the new year, might this be our prayer, as well? Take time today to pray that you will continue to pursue this journey with God, this journey of discipleship, this journey of the “altogether Christian”; that you will love God with heart and mind and soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Take time to pray for God’s guidance in the new year, that by following in the way of Jesus this year, you might experience holy freedom, rejoice in the hope and peace that only God gives, and share the love of God with everyone you encounter. Then you’ll be sure to hear, at the end of this next year, “Well and faithfully done . . . enter into my joy!”
Rev. Elizabeth Ingram Schindler
1Charles Wesley, “Come, Let Us Anew Our Journey Pursue,” Hymnary.org, accessed July 17, 2019, https://hymnary.org/text/come_let_us_anew_our_journey_pursue_roll.