What weights should you just drop this New Year?

In this month’s Voice of Hope series Fr Alvan Ibeh looks at what weights we might let go of in this new year.

I welcome you, dear friends, to this month’s voice of hope series and may I congratulate you for making it to the New Year of 2023. No matter how hard, rough and tough the 2022 flight was, the most important thing is that we all made it to the end. We all landed safely by the grace of God.

I wish to remind you once again that it was not all about you, but as the scripture says, ‘it is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning, great is his faithfulness ‘(Lamentations 3:22-24), and as Romans 9:16 says, ‘It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy’.

So that we were able to see the end of the 2022 flight and have already boarded another flight (flight 2023), we give God all the glory, and we decree and declare that we all shall live to see the end of this flight, but it will not see our end, Amen and Amen.

Remember that every airplane has its capacity, and excess weight can be hazardous and even lead to the airplane crashing. I watched a documentary the other day on how planes are being built, and I discovered that even the type of paint used on airplanes could add more weight to the aircraft, which won’t be suitable for it. So a particular kind of paint is used to avoid unnecessarily putting more weight on the airplane.

What am I trying to say here? We must be mindful of what we carry over from the previous flight to the new one. The capacity of each airplane varies, so you don’t carry anything that was a weight in your life in the previous year into the New Year. This may be an excess weight for your new flight and may lead to unnecessary struggles in the New Year. Some give up so quickly because they decided to carry over things they would have let go of, something they would have dealt with and then carry on with life.

Living in the past is a choice we consciously or unconsciously make. That I decided to carry over the grudge I have against someone from 2022 to 2023 is a choice I have made. I could also let it go and not carry it over to enjoy my peace of mind in the New Year.

Each year has its weight, and carrying over the weight of the previous year will be intentionally over-labouring ourselves. When this happens, we see that even at the beginning of a New Year, we are already struggling with many things because while others are only living in the present, we are still in the past and trying to meet up with the present.

Whatever happened last year, especially the not-so-good experiences we had, has become a weight we must let go of to move forward at the right pace we are supposed to in this New Year. Can you imagine you running with a heavy load at your back? This can be one of the most difficult things you would want to do. Running will be challenging, but once you let go of that weight, you will immediately see how easy things will become.

Hebrews 12: 1 says, ‘Therefore since such a great cloud of witnesses surrounds us, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us’.

Pause now and ask yourself, ‘What are the weights that I have carried over into this year that I need to drop now it is still early?’ So the things that constitute weights in our lives that we need to work on this year may include apathy towards God, pride, worry, anger, materialism, hatred, unforgiveness, etc.

We shall be looking at these things in our next article, so don’t miss to grab the next edition of our newspaper and send some copies to your family and friends. May this year be a year of over-flowing blessings for us all. Until the edition, may God bless us and His face shine on us all. Amen.

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