Links for the Weekend (2024-01-05)

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

New Year, New Joys, New Sorrows

What does it look like to face a new year as a Christian? Tim Challies provides a good answer, urging us to trust God in 2024.

What is certain is that 2024 will bring both joys and sorrows, both gains and losses. There will be good days and bad, joyful seasons and grievous. Some circumstances we will look forward to and some we will dread. That’s the nature of life here between Genesis chapter 3 and Revelation chapter 22—between sin’s entrance and abolition, between the first tears and the last.

Winter Solstice

This article by Hannah Anderson is an encouraging reflection on light and darkness in the winter, with the reminder that God is Lord of both.

Now I can tell you all the reasons why darkness is a good thing, how it allows for cycles of rest and dormancy, how it establishes day and night and helps us keep time. I can tell you how our bodies are set to its changes. I can tell you that certain things require darkness, that only certain things can be learned there. I can tell you that the stars shine brightest against a frozen winter sky, but this is all cold comfort when the nights are long and lonely. 

Plan Like a Christian

Even (especially?) those of us who like to plan need to remember to plan like a Christian.

Sometimes, we plan as if we were not vapor and mist, flower and grass, here by morning and gone by night. Sometimes, we reduce planning to prayerless reason and pro-con lists, tools of self-reliant minds. Sometimes, we don’t even say under our breath, “If the Lord wills . . .” (James 4:15). We are made in the image of a planning God, and those who plan sometimes take the image and forget the God.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here.