The Rt Rev Susan Brown offers a message of hope for 2019.

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IN Dornoch, on the last day of the year, there is a massive street party which increases the local population enormously!

The town gets incredibly busy and all the hotels and B&Bs are filled to the gunnels.

About 15 years ago the youth group in the Cathedral at the time, decided to build a seven tier labyrinth using stones and candles and invited the older congregation to come along to walk it. It was a great success and every year since we have set it up and opened the doors for a couple of hours before all the festivities begin. The building is in complete darkness and we play some Taize music over the sound system and we invite people to come and walk, explaining to them that on Hogmanay we want them to journey to the heart of Christ and then turn to face the new year with him.

We now get people for whom this is an important breathing space in all the celebrations. It ofers a peaceful and peace-illed opportunity for all ages to pause and offer thanks for the year past as they begin to look to the year ahead.

None of us knows what 2019 will hold. All of us have our hopes and fears for it. What we have as Christians, is the assurance – not that everything will be perfect – but that in everything we will have company: the company of a God who refuses to leave us to our own devices.

The 23rd Psalm talks of the Lord as a Shepherd who walks with us, bedding us down in lush green meadows, leading his people by streams of fresh water and helping us (as ‘The Message’ translates it) to catch our breath.

Beautiful words.

But there are even more beautiful to come because the Psalm does not shy away from the dark valleys of life that have to be faced. There too, even when those valleys turn out to be frighteningly bleak and as a dark as death, we have the promise of a God who is with us, sharing our tears, carrying us and again ‘The Message’ translation ofers a thought-provoking translation, reminding us as it does, that in whatever we face, the beauty and love of our God chase after us. That beauty and love is persistent. It is relentless. It will not give up. Ever.

As a new year begins, we are all being invited once more, to put our hand in the outstretched hand of our Lord. We are challenged to trust that in everything, God is. And will always be. We are not on our own.

This message however, is not for us alone. It is designed to give us the courage to let God’s presence make a world of difference to the life of the whole world.

“As a new year begins, we are all being invited once more, to put our hand in the outstretched hand of our Lord. We are challenged to trust that in everything, God is. And will always be. We are not on our own.

We need to think how, in 2019, we are going to do that – because it is a message the world very much needs to hear. My personal prayer for this year is that the beauty and love of God might ill every corner of the world. Even through us.

The Rt Rev Susan Brown is minister at Dornoch Cathedral and Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 2018/19.