The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a week of evaluation for me. I look back at the year that has been, celebrating accomplishments, analyzing struggles, assessing what worked well and what did not. I look ahead to the 52 weeks on the horizon, plotting out new hopes and rhythms. It is a week of anticipation and reflection that I look forward to each year.
A few months ago I came across a meditation by pastor, author, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman titled, “Through the Coming Year.” Written initially for the congregation of Fellowship Church in San Francisco, where Thurman served as co-pastor in the first racially integrated and intercultural church in the United States, the meditation builds on the refrain, “Grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart.” It is an honest meditation, noting the reality of “inaccuracies of judgment” and mistaking “my light for Thy light,” that are sure to accompany all of us in the coming year. Yet, the meditation does not end with struggle, but with a hopeful petition, “Give me the quiet assurance of Thy Love and Thy Presence.”
Amidst all of my hopes and dreams for 2023 – dreams of accomplishment and opportunity and love – I acknowledge that challenge and trial also will be present. As I spend some of this week dreaming about the year ahead, it is easy to be seduced into believing that next year will bring all the goodness and success I failed to realize in 2022. Instead, I hope to balance my goals with truth, and to aim above all for faithfulness.
Whatever may come in 2023, may I – may we – pass through it with a faithful heart.
Through the Coming Year[1]
By Howard Thurman
Grant that I may pass through
the coming year with a faithful heart.
There will be much to test me and make weak my strength before the year ends. In my confusion I shall often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which I am ashamed. There will be errors in the mind and great inaccuracies of judgment which shall render me the victim of my own stupidities.
In seeking the light, I shall again and again find myself walking in the darkness. I shall mistake my light for Thy light and I shall drink from the responsibility of the choice I make. All of these things, and more, will be true for me because I have not yet learned how to keep my hand in Thy hand.
Nevertheless, grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart. May I never give the approval of my heart to error, to falseness, to vainglory, to sin. Though my days be marked with failures, stumblings, fallings, let my spirit be free so that Thou may take it and redeem my moments
in all the ways my needs reveal. Give me the quiet assurance of Thy Love and Thy Presence.
Grant that I may pass through
the coming year with a faithful heart.
[1] Howard Thurman, “Through the Coming Year,” in Meditations of the Heart (Harper & Row: New York, 1953), 96.
