A happy new year to you all! Your car has just depreciated $1000, and all your clothes are now last year’s!

Isn’t time a mysterious entity? I’m amazed that I’ve experienced 58 ‘new year’s days’ – time has sped by so quickly. For children, of course, time has a different quality: for them eternity is the period between birthdays.

We human beings appear on the stage so transiently. We do our bit-part, and move into the wings, to make way for others. The Egyptian Sphinx has watched Antony and Cleopatra, Alexander, Napoleon, Mussolini and Aussie World War 2 soldiers all stare up at it. They are now in the history books, but the sphinx remains…

Stephen Leacock once wrote: ‘How strange is our little procession called life! The child says, ‘When I am big…’ and then, grown up, he or she says, ‘When I am married.’ But then the thought turns to ‘When I am able to retire.’ Then when retirement comes, we look back over the landscape traversed. A cold wind blows over it. Somehow we have missed it all, and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.’

Life is in the living! If I were an old-fashioned novelist I’d probably start a book I was writing with: ‘In this year of grace, 1991…’

But will it be a year of grace? That depends – mostly – on yourself. As Shakespeare put onto the lips of Cassius: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’

I am reading a new book by Dexter Dunphy and Doug Stace, Under New Management: Australian Organizations in Transition. In the 1890s – a hundred years ago – Australians were the wealthiest people in the world. Now we’re fourteenth, and slipping. Australia’s productivity is at least twenty per cent below that of comparable enterprises in competitor countries. Why? Several reasons, but we’re relying too heavily on industries where world markets are declining. It was too easy for us to mine our wealth out of the ground, or shear it off the backs of sheep. But new plastics are replacing many metals, and synthetic fibres wool. We’ve got to be clever, as well as lucky. That will take hard work, and ingenuity, and the development of creativity.

However, for some, the fault will lie outside themselves. Since 1900, in Australia, over two million people have been killed or injured on our roads. More than half of these accidents were wholly or partially due to alcohol. This year – if it’s an average sort of year – about 4,000 Australians, many of them young, will die on our roads. Throughout the world, the death toll will be about a quarter of a million.

During the 1970s and 80s many a beautiful dream has died. We lost the hope of a world guided by notions of meekness, rather than blatant self-interest. The gap between rich and poor – everywhere – is widening. The arms race hasn’t lessened, as we thought it might, and the Gulf War has offered us a new TV spectator sport. So many of our dreams have wilted, our hopes have withered. So as we brace ourselves for a rough passage into the 1990s, with a future bleaker than it looked a generation ago, is there a word from the Lord for us?

As Jesus spoke about his impending death to his disciples, there were two dominant responses: the earliest – resentment; later – fear. You’ll recall that right through Jesus’ ministry his friends didn’t understand this sort of destiny. They’d been conditioned to believe in another kind of saviour, and therefore their motives in committing themselves to Jesus were not always what they should have been. Peter, not usually backward in putting his thoughts into words, tried to talk Jesus out of such a possibility, thus re-enacting one of Jesus’ greatest temptations. Jesus’response was swift and devastating: ‘Get behind me, Satan!’

In the passage we read from John 16, Jesus is talking very frankly to his friends about what was soon to happen. There was plenty to be fearful about. They would be persecuted by the Jewish authorities, and even martyred (16:1-4). He was going to leave them – in a world of sin, unrighteousness, and judgment. Like a woman in childbirth, their pain and trauma would be intense (19-22). And in the hour of trial, they would all desert him (32). Their destiny: suffering (33)!

But the chapter ends with one of the most encouraging and hope-producing words Jesus ever uttered: ‘In the world you’ll have trouble, but don’t be afraid, I have overcome the world!’

Just as Jesus was identified with us in our defeats and sicknesses and suffering, so, he says, we can be identified with him in his victory. This opens up some amazing possibilities. His victories I can make my own. If I adjust my life to his, and relate intimately to him, when he overcomes I can overcome. I actually live by the life and victories of Another. That doesn’t imply the absence of trouble, but the transformation of trouble.

Stanley Jones tells of a missionary couple, married rather late in life, but who were deeply in love with each other. The husband at the breakfast table was telling guests of a dream he had the night before. His wife broke in, ‘Why, Frank, did you dream that dream or did I?’ They were so identified with each other’s experiences that they couldn’t tell which one dreamed the dream! We can smile at the naivete of these married lovers, but in truth a committed Christian can say to Christ, ‘Why Master, did you win that battle, or did I?’ And we hear him gently answer, ‘Why, we both did, for my victories are your victories!’

Jesus can overcome your feelings of resentment and fear: you don’t have to harbour them in this new year!

The dictionary defines resentment as having negative or bitter feelings about someone or something. There’ll be many people in your life this year who will not measure up to your expectations. And if you want to win any other battles, you’ve got to learn to accept and forgive people. In fact, Jesus said that if you want mountains to be moved in your life you must ‘forgive anything you may have against anyone’ (Mark 11:22-25).

Resentments are deadly – literally. ‘Nothing on earth consumes a person more quickly than the passion of resentment,’ said Nietzsche.

What happens TO us in life is relatively unimportant; it’s what happens IN us that counts. And we can handle the conflicts we have with people or situations three ways. We can be resentful, and ask ‘Why… me?’ And if we add enough resentment to a calamity we can prepare for a nervous breakdown. Or we can give in to resignation – a kind of fatalistic ‘whatever will be will be’ attitude. Some kinds of fatalism can have Christian- sounding explanations. For example, when sickness or trouble comes we say ‘It’s the will of God.’ Leslie Weatherhead calls that the ‘will-of-God heresy’.

‘But,’ you ask, ‘isn’t everything that happens God’s will?’ The answer is simply ‘no!’ Who rained all those calamities down on Job? Did God? No. The Bible is very specific about that: it was Satan who did all that. So when YOU get boils, don’t blame God! Who drove the thorn into Paul’s side? Did God? No, again. The Bible says this was Satan’s messenger to Paul (2 Cor. 12:7).

Perhaps you are resentful about your job. The TV tells you the world is an exciting place, but you’re stuck there. Well, Jesus has overcome the world of the commonplace. Remember he lived in a village for 30 years, and worked in what many would consider a boring job, by a carpenter’s bench. He may have had to support a widowed mother and the family. And so, with the messianic urgency growing within him, he had to exist in ‘cramped’ surroundings for 90% of his life!

A French writer describes our frustrations as coming from the fact that ‘we have one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and we are torn between two worlds.’ Jesus had the ability to relate one with the other. ‘The making of a plough had within it the remaking of the world, so he would make that plough well, and worthy of a world’s Redeemer. If you do a small thing as though it were a great thing, God will let you do the great thing as though it were a small thing. So day by day in commonplace Nazareth he wove with infinite patience the seamless robe which he would wear before the world’ (Stanley Jones).

The answer to calamity and resentment: Rejoice always, pray at all times, be thankful in all circumstances (1Thess. 5:16-18). As the beautiful book by David Steindl-Rast suggests, live a life of gratefulness: it is the heart of all true prayer. Don’t nurture your resentments: Christ has overcome the world of resentment!

And don’t nurture your fears. Eighty-one times the Bible quotes God or Christ urging his people not to be afraid! Ours is certainly an ‘age of anxiety’. Anxiety is fear in search of a cause. The wealthy are afraid inflation will eat into their savings. The poor are afraid they won’t make ends meet.

Fear is what we feel in the presence of real or imagined danger. Some fears are our friends: they link us to reality and prepare us for flight! Other fears – perhaps most? – are imaginary, and destructive. Normal fear makes us jump back onto the kerb if an unexpected car is coming. Abnormal fear is hellish – and the smoke of its torment ascends upwards forever until one learns that ‘perfect love casts out fear.’

This year, face your fears with the help of another. As Norman Vincent Peale warns, ‘Don’t settle down to live permanently with your fear. If you do you will never be happy or effective.’ And you won’t get rid of negative attitudes like fear by changing locations. I once visited a ‘model town’ in the U.S. where psychologists and architects worked together to produce an ‘ideal’ environment for humans to live in But it witnessed more suicides than almost anywhere else in America!

Do we move beyond fear and anxiety by summoning our courage and saying, ‘There, now, be brave!’? You can’t easily exhort yourself out of fear into bravery. The steps to take begin with facing up to your fear: some fears are simply products of an over-active imagination. Then begin to replace fear with faith. ‘The only known cure for fear,’ says a famous psychiatrist, ‘is faith.’ ‘I sought the Lord,’ said David, ‘and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.’ Then externalize them – in writing, or, better, by verbalizing them with a trusted friend.

Love is the other antidote for fear: that is why Jesus refers to love so much in his upper room discourse. Don’t park by your resentments! And don’t park by your fears. In truth perfect love casts out both!

Rowland Croucher