This week's Theme: Show me now your way
Day 1: The path forward
"Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight...If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth” (Exodus 33:13, 15 - NKJV).
Many who have experienced a hard year would certainly identify with the sentiments of Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die... (In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 106).
The poem captures Tennyson's own struggle with sorrow and pain. Some time before, his dear friend Arthur Hallam had died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 22. Hallam had been engaged to Tennyson's sister Emilia.
In the months that followed his friend's death, Tennyson wrote the poem as he struggled to reconcile issues of grief, loss, and faith. He structures the theme of moving forward within the context of embracing a new year—ringing out the old and ringing in the new.
Centuries earlier, Moses too, struggled with the uncertainty of the future even as he understood the need to move forward. And he knew the only way he could find the path forward and face the unknown was to ask for God's guidance and Presence: "...If I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight...If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here" (Exodus 33:13,15 - NKJV).
Like both Moses and Tennyson, most of us probably want to leave the sorrows, the distresses, the mistakes and the struggles of the past behind. We desperately want to ring out the old and ring in the new.
But we know that each year comes with its share of uncertainties and challenges. Human inequity, human strife, and human greed will follow us into the new year and will remain until the Christ that is to be. Yet we can be certain that the God of all ages, the Ancient of Days, will be with us as we ask for His guiding Presence.
As we ask, like Tennyson, Ring out the darkness of the land—as we pray, like Moses, "Show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight," He will answer us, "My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest" (Exodus 33:14 - NKJV).
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson ~ Published 1850
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