Well, here we are. A full three weeks into 2009, and I haven't yet broken a new year's resolution! I confess I made that easy for myself this year by not making any. I remember when I was a kid, my mother used to sit us down with pencil and paper on New Year's Eve, and make us write our resolutions, and then we would keep track of them for maybe a week or so until, accidentally of course, those papers went out with the garbage.

(We would have recycled them, but there were no blue boxes back then!)

Seriously though, a new year almost inevitably gives us pause, makes us think over what has happened in the past year, and look ahead to what the year ahead might hold. No wonder some people are afflicted with the "January blahs"!

The excitement of Christmas is over. Even people like me who held on to their tree until Twelfth Night, have put their sad, denuded, needle shedding trees out at the curb. Kids are back in school, and life goes back to normal, or something approaching that.

But for so many folks, even on a good year, January can bring a kind of empty feeling. The days are still short. Darkness still comes so early, even though we remind ourselves that, in fact, we're on the upward swing, and each day has more daylight than the one before.This year, there is a different kind of darkness, a kind of cloud hanging overhead. TV news and our daily newspapers are full of such terrible stuff: the mounting death toll among our soldiers in Afghanistan, the horror of what's going on in Gaza, crime in our cities and the elephant that just won't leave the room, the economic crisis that, one way or another, touches all of us, some more disastrously than others.

So, what is a Christian to do at a time like this? Well, I think that we really have something going for us, something to help us through dark days.

Let's just keep in mind what it was that we were so recently celebrating. Let's remember what Christmas was all about, the birth of Jesus. This was not just some child who would grow to live out a fairly public life, only to die ignominiously, and pass from history. Had that been the case, we wouldn't still be celebrating his birth. This was God's own Son. This was Emmanuel, and Emmanuel, as you know, means "God with us".Emmanuel.

That is what we can hold on to when days are dark and the going is tough. God was with us in the flesh of that helpless infant. God was with us in the man Jesus as he walked the dusty roads of Palestine 2000 years ago, as he healed the sick and told of God's kingdom of love. And we have his promise, and his promise w e believe, that he is with us still, loving us and willing us to persevere in the faith, even, and perhaps especially, when times are hard.

I said that I made no new year resolutions this year, but somewhere in the night of New Year's Eve, I remembered something I hope will stay with me in the days ahead. I can't remember the origin of this. I've a feeling it came out of the dark years of World War 2. My father had it framed above his desk in his study, and I would like to share it with you.I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."

And he said to me, "Go out into the darkness,and put your hand into the hand of God.

That will be for you better than a light,and safer than the known way."Emmanuel. God with us, forever!