One Day To Year's End, Anticipating Century's End

While it's not impossible we will be walking the earth or another planet in the year 2100, with eighty-eight years left on the calendar until then I'm not too worried about it. I'd be one hundred twenty-nine (129) by then, and even George Friedman, the futurist and founder of STRATFOR, the world's leading private intelligence and forecasting company, who authored The Next 100 Years which I've just finished reading yesterday (ISBN 978067923057), admits it's impossible to see specifics, only likelihoods. Still, finding some of his predictions running counter to conventional wisdom – by this decade's end and into the next he's predicting the fragmentation of Russia and China, by mid-century a space based war between the United States and a bloc led by Poland versus Japan and Turkey, and by century's end preparations for a confrontation between the United States and Mexico for domination of North America. Trust me, it reads quite intelligently.

At least it reads better and is approached more intelligently than some of the predictions I'd made when I was in college in the early 90s about how the beginning of this century would look! (I remember the USA becoming part of a North American Federation including Canada and Mexico as an outgrowth of NAFTA and the self styled “Queen of Qandahar” restoring order to Afghanistan and its neighbors in the mid-2000s … you know, I've probably still got that sheet somewhere, I wrote it as an exercise when I took an International Relations course at Stetson in fall of 1993.) But now that we're at just year's end and you know that you'll tune in to “Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve” (snif, the first one without him, who died in April) or watch the ball drop somehow, and to be quite honest it's a mite arbitrary to start changing your life just because it's the first of January – consider that in centuries past the new year began on April first and is still not universal around the world. But that's another story …

This weekend I did go to our last Breakfast with the Boys at church, and I had my big girl Sarah (who'll be 94 by century's end) with me because she saw the light downstairs and couldn't go back to sleep. I brought her with so Martha (123) and Jeffrey (93; I expect our kids' children are most likely to see 2100, barring MORE unforeseen circumstances) could get the sleep they needed and enjoyed steak and eggs, hash browns, fried onions, fruit, orange juice, and coffee with twelve others. And she actually ate pretty well! Our Bible study text was a bit ironic, I thought, right after Christmas – it was Luke 2:41-52, which picks up when Jesus was twelve years old in Jerusalem for the passover and Joseph and Mary go a day before they even miss Him (see verse forty-four) and in three days' time find Him in the temple “about [His] Father's business” (see verse fifty). Jesus doesn't appear next in His own story for eighteen days, and I remarked it's better that we don't know as much as maybe we'd like to.

We'd be looking for hidden meaning ALL THE TIME in the minute details of Jesus' life, those who believe in Him as Savior and Lord and those who don't. And to be about our Father's business, to go into all the world and preach the gospel, we don't need to have (indeed, we can't have) all the answers. Saying this may make me unwelcome in some circles, but as I approach a new year, a new beginning – yes, I still honor that – I have to realize that what I think of as failure is by no means final unless I allow it to be. Those of us who view the next year, the next week, or the next day as the end of the world … well, we've seen what becomes of prophecies like that. We either become self-fulfilling or if our year, week, or day becomes to our surprise better than we hope, we become cynical. I don't make resolutions anymore, at least not New Year's ones. It's just better, particularly in light of my own experience at home this weekend, to not read more into my life than is happening.

Praise God that my kids still want to play with ME! (I'd say “and Martha too” but she can write her own experience with that.) Yesterday the three of us made up a game using a Monopoly board, a deck of playing cards to determine moves, and various objects for markers as well as special functions for spaces on the board, like railroads allowing you to go to the other side lickety-split, Chance spaces making you move in the other direction, Community Chests making you lose a turn and the like … Jeffrey and I played it again after I heard him read and improve writing his own name “because he cares”. And by this morning it looked really good. Sarah and I played best two out of three “Hi Ho Cherry O!” and she won; this morning they shoveled our sidewalks in below zero weather without too much fuss on the last day they get to bring Martha to work with me for the year. And after today neither Martha nor I go back to work until Wednesday … then get out of my way.

See you next year!

David