Hey Bridge Town Church and all of you listening online, welcome to the Bridge Town Daily for Monday, January 4th.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Daily is back. It's a new year and a new season.

And I love the new year because it's an intuitive time to pause and reflect.

This coming Sunday, I am God willing, teaching on the prayer of examine from Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.

And I will make a case that we don't change from experience.

We change when we reflect on our experience with God and with other people.

And the beginning of the year is a natural time to kind of reflect on our experience, to pause and to take a deep breath

and to look forward to the year to come to 2021 and kind of take a bird's eye view of our life and reset our habits every January or kind of over the Christmas break.

I sit down and I pull out my life plan with my seven major goals for my life.

And I kind of take a long hard look at my habits and my schedule and all of that.

It's a great time to kind of take a deep breath and kind of reset your form.

But also not only to look forward, also to look back, in this case, on 2020, and to reflect, to let the past form us rather than malform us.

Because it has the potential to do either.

And coming off 2020, you know, a lot of us, I know that I don't just speak for myself here, are still reeling from all of the chaos and how our life just kind of fell apart at some level last year.

And on one hand, we made it.

If you were listening to this, you made it through 2020. Well done.

But it really does feel more like a gift to me than an accomplishment.

I came to the end of the year on one hand, feeling beat up and a bit burned out.

But on the other, feeling a profound gratitude to God for his fidelity to me and my family and to our church.

And even to our city. So on the one hand, we have the sense of, you know, we made it.

On the other hand, a lot of us came out of 2020 with a wound.

And this is inevitable. We live in a world where the three enemies of the soul, the world, the flesh, and the devil are all on the loose and wreaking havoc, not only in our society, but in our soul.

...