Welcome again to Things Unseen.

I can imagine many regular members of our podcast community may possibly have missed the last

couple of days, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

But here we are in a kind of no-man's land between the Christmas Day and Boxing Day. But here we are in a kind of no man's land between

the Christmas Day celebrations and the beginning of a new year. Still feeling the events

of Christmas and maybe trying to get some energy back, and we are not yet at the fullness of the

end of the year and the beginning of a new one. At least, I suspect

most of us aren't quite there emotionally. You probably know that the month of January is named

after the Roman god Janus. Incidentally, isn't it odd that despite the impact of the Christian faith, we still use

these pagan names both for the days of the week and the months of the year?

It's always intrigued me.

And yet perhaps in God's providence it's a reminder to us that we live between the times,

like between Christmas and New Year, between the coming of Christ and then the return of Christ.

We're part of God's new creation, we're new men and women in Christ, but we are still living in a world that is alienated from him.

And even the names of the days of the week and the months of the year are a constant reminder

of that to us.

But back to Janus, he's the God who faces both ways.

He looks backwards to the past and he looks forward to the future.

So even if we don't especially like the fact that the coming month is named after a Roman

deity, I think we can understand the experience.

And here's the interesting thing.

There's a very specifically Christian version of it, because as Christians we too live facing both ways, not in the sense

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