TOMORROW'S UNOPENED DOOR

May I wish you a good New Year.

- By Rev Tom Cant

May you always enjoy health for the coming days, and continually find strength for the demands that these days may bring.A little poem...

'Footfalls echo in the memory. Down the passage we did not take. Towards the door we never opened.'

'Towards the door we never opened'-that line from T.S. Eliot's poem 'Burnt Norton' is such a telling way for us to describe our New Year. We stand at the beginning of a new year, we reach out to grasp its unopened door.

We wonder what we may have to face, what wounds to suffer, what reversals to endure. It is indeed a daunting task to face the future's unknown.

But the Christian faith offers a different way to face our unrevealed future. Jesus said:"I am the door, if anyone enters by me he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture" (John 10.9).

We need to set this saying within the rural environment of Jesus' day to appreciate the full force of Jesus' teaching, then Jesus' teaching becomes very exciting and intimately real.