January ushers in the New Year, but first it takes a nice long rest. It looks at the new resolutions and chuckles. It knows we are all playing possum now that the holidays are over and have done us in. We owe money, we gained weight and now we watch the weather forecasts as if they were our main entertainment.

I look out the window. My neighbor across the street still turns his Christmas lights on every night. They are starkly beautiful now, deer grazing in the yard and all of his bushes outlined in a glorious twinkle.

I go to the store and get some towels on sale. I eat fabulous chocolates knowing I will have to diet at some point. But not now.

I get my first income tax information. I put it in my shabby lavender file. It will be weeks before I look at it again.

I buy some salad ingredients and slowly put them together for the next day. I eat them for lunch and wake up in the night with heartburn. I was overzealous about their consumption and now I pay the piper. I make a mess trying to find heartburn medication. I find it, but not before getting thing turned upside down.

I watch the Jeopardy Game of Champions. I sit and do nothing for hours. I have no wish to stir around.

All of this is God paying us back for what we have done to Christmas.

God is who we forget we are. Thank God, He gets the joke. He saves his power for his grand gestures of love.

I have received several of them in my lifetime and many of them I have missed. He knows nothing can be done by the mind.

The heart ends up inheriting all of our mental work, leaving the mind blank as mine is as I write this.

Somebody start the first chorus of Cumbayah. It’s time for some music.