Most commercial calendars and diaries begin on 1st January. For this reason they make popular Christmas presents and, no doubt, many of you will be about to press your new diary or wall calendar into service. But there is nothing intrinsically obvious about starting a new year on 1st January. My own diary, for instance, begins on Advent Sunday each year, reflecting the fact that the church's year is generally reckoned to begin in Advent. Those who work in schools or universities may well be working to an academic calendar that begins in September. Indeed, in England at least, even 1st January is a comparatively recent innovation as the start of the calendar year. Until the British Calendar Act of 1751 (whose primary purpose was to introduce the Gregorian Calendar for the whole United Kingdom), New Year's Day in England was always reckoned to be 25th March. Thus the year 1751 in England lasted only just over nine months. Very confusing.

Calendars are human constructs. They are designed to enable humans to regulate dates that occur on a cyclical basis (for example religious festivals); to calculate important dates that might occur in the future (such as the point at which a loan must be repaid); or to commemorate events that happened in the past (the Christian calendar takes as its starting point the birth of Christ). This human view of time is in sharp contrast with God's time, which stands outside and beyond us. To live in God's time is to be freed of the constraints that can seem sometimes to make the calendar a means of tyranny; it is to glimpse the transcendence of a God who declares, in Jesus, that before Abraham was, I am. To live in God's time is, as I have read recently, 'to rely not on our own limited strength alone, but on the Lord who renews our strength; it is to be not closed in on ourselves, but taken out of ourselves, so that we may truly come to ourselves.'