After laying the foundation of this blog and allowing it to grow moss for nine months, I return with intent to feed and water the garden back to health. I have to remind myself that while a weblog should not become a trash heap of rhetoric, it’s also nearly impossible to craft one into some kind of masterpiece. I’ve seen plenty of the former and none of the latter.
I pen this entry in homage to the New Year.
Historically, New Year’s Day has had no impact on my being and thinking. I could say the same for my birthday, or anyone else’s. I’ve always thought too much homage was given to these milestones, and not enough care was given to the really important events and developments in between. Although this thinking has not changed, my appreciation for the potential value of these milestones has.
What has happened for me is I’ve just begun to see past the superficial New Year’s rhetoric and resolutions, and I suddenly see things that really matter for real people, right now. From now on, New Year’s Day for me is Hope & Prosperity Day.
In my vocation, I correspond with scores of people every day from every corner of the earth: research scientists in U.S., British and Israeli government defense labs, university professors in Germany, Russia, Brazil and Japan, young students in Colombia, Ireland and Poland, as well as American Ivy League schools, industrial engineers in Metropolitan China and the Heartland of America, company executives and their front desk receptionists. I feel privileged to call this my work, because each one of these people are very different, one from the other. Nearly all of them are accomplished in life by anyone’s standards, from 101 level academic achievements up to and including receipt of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among these brilliant men and women are many Orthodox Jews, observant Muslims and Christians who serve as elders in their Churches.
For me there is one thing they all have in common, and I with them: we all have genuine hope and optimism for the year to come, and we’ve been sharing that with one another by email and phone in subtle but meaningful ways. Professors in China wish me and my family a happy and blessed New Year, with prosperity, and I genuinely wish them the same back. And I’ve come to discover that the sacred day commemorating Jesus Christ’s birth has profound implications in secular Japan and nearly secular western Europe.
As a professing Christian, I believe in good and evil, and I believe good wins, but not without great cost to beauty and innocence. I believe there are dark forces at work in this world, here, there and everywhere. These forces will do all they can to crush hope and undermine prosperity, to manifest themselves through misguided doctrines and suspicions, envy and strife. But these forces are not the men and women I interface with each day. Those are people, and God’s children, and I want nothing less than the best for them and their families, because we can all have it. Dark thoughts would have us think life is a zero-sum game, wealth and happiness are limited, and we must take it back from one another. Socialism thinks this, communism thinks this, power-seizing warlords and raging terrorists think this. This thinking is all a lie.
And so to all who read this, and to those who don’t, I wish you boundless hope and prosperity in the new year and heartfelt gratitude for the countless blessings of the year past.
