ABOUT five months ago our little grandson, then 15 months old, trotted across the room enthusiastically with a rubber ball in each hand and placed them on the table, bending over them with wonder and saying ‘Aah!’ This so much reminded me of God looking over his world and seeing that “it was ‘very good’”.

What better way to make a new beginning at the start of this New Year than to recover a sense of wonder at the deep-down goodness, amazing beauty, diversity and power of our much threatened living earth! Because wonder, I believe, moves us to give thanks, to recognise the miracle of life – yours, mine, and that of God’s and our living world – and to reaffirm the unique-beyond-price value of it all.

If this world is to survive and recover from all the evil that we human beings inflict on it, and on one another, it is up to us. God is not going to come suddenly down and rescue us all. He has called upon us, depends on us, to be his workforce for the healing of the world.

So, I suggest that this could be the stuff of a New Year Resolution for all of us. That we, each and all, resolve to live and work together out of this sense of wonder and gratitude and love, to bring healing to our world and its life and people by doing justice, mercy and compassion, by strengthening and encouraging one another, and – in spite of all our understandable depression and fear – to say “Yes, we CAN”, and do it!

Paul Fisher

Retired minister and musician