If you fly very often, you appreciate the need to travel lightly. When you’re trying to hoist that bag into the overhead bin while 75 or so other angry travelers are waiting in the aisle, you begin to realize that maybe next time you can do without that extra pair of shoes and the bowling ball.
I’ve learned to travel lightly. Taking only the essentials makes the trip so much easier and more enjoyable. When packing, I have to let go of some stuff I might otherwise like to take along. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to leave behind.
I look around airports and see that some people have yet to learn to travel lightly. They push the envelope with the number and size of their carry-on baggage. Their rolling luggage has so many strapped-on and tied-down attachments, they wear themselves out pushing and pulling from concourse to concourse.
Tonight, we’re on the cusp of a new year. Will you travel lightly into 2009, or will you hoist those unresolved burdens of the prior years into tomorrow? Consider these words of the Apostle Paul, from his letter to the church at Colossae.
Put these all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. …Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all else, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3: 8-11; 12-14)What are you holding onto that will impede your experience of a joyous new year? Travel lightly into tomorrow, and leave it behind. Put on your new clothes of compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, patience, and especially love.
It seems so simple and perhaps naïve. Yet, it’s what we profess that we believe. In 2009, let’s live like we believe it.
Dear God, as we prepare to soar into the new year, give us the courage to leave behind those things that will unnecessarily weigh us down, so that we might be renewed in Your image and live like Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Jeff Taylor
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