Five helps for the New Year

• Thank God. Often and always. Thank Him carefully and wonderingly for your continuing privileges and for every experience of His goodness. Thankfulness is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.

•Take care about the confession of your sins. As time passes the habit of being critical about people and things grows more than you realise. He then gently commends the practice of sacramental confession.

• Be ready to accept humiliations. People can hurt terribly, but they can also help to keep you humble. Whether trivial or huge, accept them. All these are some of the chances to be a little nearer to our Lord. There is nothing to fear if you are near to the Lord and in His hands.

• Do not worry about status. There is only one status that Our Lord bids us to be concerned with, and that is our proximity to Him. “If a man serve me, let him follow me, and where I am there also shall my servant be,” (John 12:26). This is our status; to be near our Lord wherever He may ask us to go with him.

• Use your sense of humour. Laugh at things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh at yourself.
Through the year, people will thank God for you. And let the reason for their thankfulness not just be that you are a person they like or love, but because you made God real to them.”

• The Most Rev Michael Ramsey is an influential Anglican theologian and writer. He served as the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury (from 1961-1974). He gave the “Five Helps” as a talk to his clergy one year. Ramsey died in 1988 in Oxford, England, at 83. He had a particular regard for the Eastern Orthodox concept of ‘glory.’