Hope for the New Year

 I don’t remember how the tradition started. It may have been through a conversation with other youth pastors because I knew enough to only take students in their senior year of high school, but in my youth ministry career at Lakewood Christian Church, I brought students to the Rose Bowl Parade.

We camped out on New Year’s Eve after we celebrated bringing in the New Year at an amusement park with Christian concerts. We grabbed the last front row spot near the end of the parade. We saw the bomber airplanes at 8:00AM and the police escorts at 9:30AM. We camped out at night and had a blast. We learned that at 2:00AM everyone runs to the “blue line” in the street to keep their front row spot.

The parade didn’t disappoint. The beautiful floats, in which you could actually smell the flowers, and the marching bands, including UCLA greeting us with a Happy New Year before playing their fight song and performing in the Rose Bowl game, made the experience worth every freezing moment.

Fast forward to 2015 when I volunteered to help a coworker work on the floats. I did that for two years. I saw the hard work and met creators of floats. I brought in the New Year with a new formed pride of helping with those floats, as I watched them go down Colorado Boulevard on television.

These sweet memories remind me that the New Year has potential to be life changing. We all enter the New Year with so much hope, but many of us grow weary when difficult times call for us to rise to the occasion, and we just may not have the means or strength to do that. We just have to maintain our hope.

Hope. Once we lose hope, we give up on our goals. We lose hope when something comes into our path in life that causes us to turn. Our path does not remain straight but has twists and turns and ups and downs. We cannot lose hope but keep hope and put our trust in Jesus.

Jesus gives us hope, and He wants us to move and face our challenges. No journey is complete without a challenge. On that parade route so many years ago, we searched for a decent restroom in the morning. We faced the elements of the weather with wind and cold, and yet we stayed because the parade would come in the morning. The hope of the coming parade kept us on the street.

Each New Year we have hope. This year, let that hope continue throughout the entire year. Each new day brings hope for something beautiful to come your way. It may not be a parade of flowers and marching bands, but if we can march into each day with joy that God has given us a new day to bring His Word into the world, we might truly have a Happy New Year!