Okay, it’s been a doozy. Today is that day we’ve all been waiting for since, well for most of us, last March. For my family it started on January 2.

But we made it, we are here, and we can make this year better. We took our lumps, learned a lot, and now we go into 2021 full of possibilities, hopes, and yes, we still have our dreams. We cannot live without hope and dreams.

Humans haven’t just accomplished great things in easy times. Actually, if you look back over the episodes and actions we tend to build our cultures around, the opposite is true. There were battles, plagues, hordes of invaders, nations rising and falling. Men and women stepping out of obscure everyday lives into moments of need and crises and changing their world, our world.

The world keeps on turning for you and me and all the people not because they waited on and found one man or one woman to make things better for them. We go where we need to go, we accomplish the life that keeps the world turning in quiet sacrifice and blind faith and it never gets recorded or known.

God chose his people, and they messed things up from the first moment, and struggled forever after. They sinned, wandered, fought, worshipped, failed God again and again, were exiled. And exiled again. Great leaders, including warriors, kings, prophets, lawgivers, and priests came and went. And God’s people still survived.

Jesus was born under Roman rule, he called his apostles and left his foundling Church to grow even as her members were slaughtered by the thousands. All but one of his apostles were martyred. Still, the Church could not be stopped, and for every martyr who fell, others stepped in to lead, testify, and just live out their faith, pass on the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

You don’t get to pick your times. You live today, in the here and now. Make it count, because you are, we are, what our world needs right this minute. It doesn’t have someone else and tomorrow, it has you, right now.

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