Facing the Unknown New Year – Sunday, December 31, 1950
Once more the falling curtain closes the scenes and sequences of an old year. And once more the most frequent wish from friend to friend is for happiness in the year ahead. It is strange how our standards of happiness shift with circumstances. Perhaps a year ago it would have taken much more to make us feel that we were happy than it would today. Perhaps today we would be willing to settle for less and consider ourselves exceedingly happy. But with freedom and faith men can be happy with much or more—or with little or less.
As this year comes to its close, we have less of the prospect of peace, a little less illusion about the semblance of security. But we have among us a more solid facing of facts and a better preparedness to face the facts. We have taken some things out of dark and whispered places and have looked them more fully in the face. We have stripped the deceptive veil more fully from some false philosophies.
We have more fully faced the fact that there is no ease without effort, no debt without a day of reckoning, no such thing as something for nothing, and no peace or security or protection without sacrifice and willing work. We have learned to think less of idleness and leisure and more of earnest effort. We do not expect perfection of the New Year, but we have a right to expect that we shall profit by some of the costly lessons that by now we should have learned. Nor do we know what we shall yet pass through before peace on earth prevails. But we know that it shall prevail some day.
And the days will come and go, and we shall learn to live them, and we shall hold to our hopes and dreams and ultimate aims, though some of them may for the moment be set back. And whatever our fears may be, other men who may be opposed to us also have their fears and their mountainous tasks before them, with less freedom to carry and encourage them and less faith to comfort and sustain them.
And as we look at all the factors, we still find reason for faith in the future, if we will face it as it is and not as we blindly wish it. were, and if we are prayerful and repentant and seek to know and pursue the purposes of Divine Providence. And with this faith we can face the unknown new year with the words of William Allen White: “I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday, and I love today.” Earnestly we wish for all people the happiness that comes with the pursuit of peaceful purpose.
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December 31, 1950
Broadcast Number 1,115