31st December 2025

We’ve reached the turning of the year: goodbye to 2025 and hello to 2026. TV, radio, newspapers and magazines invite us to review the year that’s departing – the past 12 months’ political headlines, major news stories, sporting events, gossip from the world of entertainment, scandals, obituaries and the like – before going on to offer their best guesses and prophecies about what we might expect in the months to come. Perhaps prompted by the casual excesses and mistakes of Christmas just gone, some folk will plan to get themselves into better order by making personal resolutions for change, by, for example, adopting mindfulness techniques, or starting a diet, or taking up a new fitness regime. Hope springs eternal, as they say!

Don’t read on if you expect some failproof wisdom from me based on my supposed many years of personal improvement! Instead, I would point you to some words of St Paul written long ago to the beleaguered church at Colossae, but still immensely valuable for us to remember in our day. ‘As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving’ (Col. 2:6-7).

I wish you all a very Happy New Year. You may already have special plans and things you’re looking forward to, or, conversely, a diary full of blank pages just waiting to be written on, but, no matter what does eventually come along in 2026, let’s hold close the resolve that we continue to live our lives in him, in Christ.

Ken Stewart