Here's my one solid prediction for 2019, for the new year
that has just begun. Ready? After much research and thought, this is my
conclusion. I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen in the next 52
weeks. Not a clue. Not a hint. I got nothing.
Okay, I do predict that the sun will come up every morning
and then set at night. I do predict that the year will contain exactly 365
days, not one more or one less. I do trust and pray that most all of us, me included,
will still be around in early January 2020 to look back on a year just finished.
But what exactly will happen in 2019? We'll know next
December 31st.
That's the only definitive thing we can declare about this
twentieth year of the twenty first century. Not that some won't try their best
to predict the future, to look out into the mists of time and imagine that if only
they are smart enough or wise enough or lucky enough or prescient enough, if
they can crunch the statistics and numbers just right, they will be able to
envision with accuracy all of our tomorrows.
But most of the time our human predictions are wrong.
The website fivethirtyeight.com, the most famous and
infamous of predictive enterprises these days, declared last March that the
Boston Red Sox had a six percent chance of winning the 2018 World Series. Oops.
That same site of predictors said Hillary Clinton was a lock for President and
had a 71.4 percent chance of winning on November 8th, 2016. Well that was bit
off. Or think of us Patriots fans, we who
were absolutely sure our hometown team would just crush the underdog Philadelphia
Eagles in last February's Super Bowl.
The betting line in the game had the Pats winning by at least five
points. Millions of dollars were lost
and thousands of hearts broken, all in making a wrong assumption.
Because we don't know what we don't know.
I get why we want to, even need, to try and predict the
future. We want to be in control. We
want to know what is coming before it arrives, to prepare ourselves. We want to
believe that chaos and random chance finally are not in the fabric of the
universe, that there is instead an underlying story about the world and our
lives that's already been written. We just have to figure it out what that is.
Some even imagine that the greatest super power to possess would be to know the
future, to see what's coming before it comes.
Anybody up for playing Powerball?
But not me. I don't
want to know, or even care to predict what is to come this year, even though
the future sometimes scares me with its unpredictability. Yet the future also
excites me with its unpredictability too. Sure, bad things will happen but good
things will happen as well. Where is the adventure in a life, if not in the
living out of life day to day? Putting forth all of the personal effort, the
energy, and the dreams and hopes and work of shaping our own destiny for the
good? Even when we fail, even when life throws us a curveball, would we really
want to know the outcome before it happened? How boring life would then
be.
And so a new year beckons, a year that's never, ever been
before. Like a blank canvas it stands before us, a gift from God, who
challenges us to embrace with gratitude the whole year, to make it all our own:
all the joys, all the sorrows, all the challenges, and all the passion yet to
come.
Yes: we have no idea what is coming and we cannot predict
the future that tomorrow holds for us. Thank God. I'm psyched for 2019. Who
knows what it will bring? No one. But I still say, "Bring it on!"
Happy New Year.
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