Happy God-blessed

New Year to You All!!!

Just a few more days and 2023 will take over!

As we look back to 2022, we end the year just as we started it- with God, with prayers, with thanksgiving, with love, faith and hope in Him! .

And shall we start, as well, the New Year- 2023- just as we started 2022- with God, with thanksgiving, with love, faith, and hope?

So much to be grateful for each day of the past year and again, for this year - God’s presence, His peace, His protection, His providence, His pardon!

And this continuing daily morning prayer: “Thank You, Lord, for Your love and care. Thank You for protecting us all from all forms of danger, evil, sickness and accident, and from the Covid virus and variants, amen!”

With love, we lift the same prayer of thanksgiving for you, dear readers, for the New Year, especially for those among you burdened with loss and other challenges.

May Jesus Christ, who is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrew 13:8) be with you all through all the days of the New Year!

No one knows what tomorrow may bring, what the New Year will be.

But let us keep this steady reassurance in our hearts:

God walks ahead of us and is in our tomorrow, just as He was in our yesterday and will be with us forever!

The readings for January 1, 2023, Sunday of the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God welcome us this New Year with so much blessings from the Lord!

In the First Reading (Numbers 6:22-27), we are reminded of Yahweh’s blessings to His people through Moses:

“May Yahweh bless you and keep you.”

“May Yahweh let his face shine on you and be gracious to you.”

“May Yahweh show you his face and bring you peace."

And Yahweh’s words to those who will call on His name - “then I shall bless them!”

In the Second Reading, we are gifted by God to be His sons, through our Lord Jesus Christ!

In Galatians 4:4-7, “  when the completion of the time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive adoption as sons.

As you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son crying, 'Abba, Father'; and so you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir, by God's own act!”

In the Alleluia, we are again reminded wonderfully that “in the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways,  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” (Hebrews 1:1-2)

What is there to fear about the coming year/s when we have with us God our Father leading us as co-heirs through Jesus Christ His Son who speaks to us directly and with the Holy Spirit guiding us?

Let us end 2022 and welcome the New Year with this prayer of praise and honor-

”Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen!”

Like the shepherds who found Christ as described in the January 1, 2023 Sunday Mass Gospel (Luke 2:16-2), let us praise and glorify our God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, with Mama Mary and Joseph, and all the angels and the saints through all the days of the New Year/s!