One of my favorite mentors wrote a book. It’s called A Year To Live: How To Live This Year As If It Were Your Last. Wow, what a book. It has had profound meaning in my life.

One of the spiritual exercises Stephen Levine recommends is what he refers to as “the life review.” Please allow me to quote.

“Reviewing our life story, with an intention to both honor and heal the past, can take a few weeks, a few months, or the rest of our lives, as unseen levels of holding gradually arise into awareness and present themselves for recuperation. It is strong medicine, a little bitter at first, but it gets sweeter as forgiveness and gratitude, mindfulness and mercy, make our blessings too many to count.”

Levine suggests that in the process of reviewing, forgiveness can take on a life of its own, the suffering around painful events can subside enough for us to comprehend what those events have to teach us, and the past takes on a different meaning. Of course, this process is not easy, but it is healing.

I’ve been reviewing the year now almost past. I must confess that it was in many ways a painful year for me. I am sensitive to the fact that it was in many ways a painful year for most of us who love Embry Hills. 2008 ended with some pain for our church, and in some ways, 2009 began in the way that 2008 ended.

During this difficult season, I have done a good bit of contemplating, of meditating, of pondering, of praying. In that sense, this has been both a painful and a generative season for me. And, as I stand with you at the end of this year and on the brink of yet another new one, I feel somehow hopeful and healed. I hope you do, too. I hope we do, too.

I invite each and all of us to review this year with what Levine calls “soft eyes.” I encourage us to review 2009 with a nonjudgmental awareness, with a kindness and spirit of forgiveness, with a sense of gratitude for whatever we may have learned, for whatever ways we may have grown. This soft-eyed view brings healing to us, individually and as a community.

This is a day of new beginnings.
Time to remember and move on.
Time to believe what Love is bringing,
Laying to rest the pain that’s gone.

Then let us with the Spirit’s daring
Step from the past and leave behind
Our disappointments, guilt, and grieving,
Seeking new paths and sure to find.

I have claimed this new beginning for myself. As one of your pastors and as one of the spiritual leaders of Embry Hills Church, I boldly and gratefully claim it for you, too, and for all of us.