New Year’s Day is the morning of the year.  It should inspire fresh hope.  Each morning we wake, after disappearing in sleep for a split second of eternity, we should feel rejuvenated like strong coffee. Scientists tell us we have successfully spun around the earth’s axis.  We have traveled 20,000 miles since yesterday, just spinning around from day to night and back to day. When we further reflect that without batting an eye or breaking a sweat, we have rocketed over a million and a half miles in our orbit around the sun since this time a day ago and that we are now going to start over and perform these same mysteries and miracles again in a mere 24 hours.  So it is every New year’s Day but on a scale, at least 356 times more inspiring. 

It’s a new year with no mistakes in it!!!  It is awe-inspiring and the same feeling that authored the first concept of new year’s resolutions.  The flesh is weak new year’s resolutions are fleeting.  Before valentine’s day or even Epiphany, we slipped back into our old ways. Nevertheless, these light-hearted resolutions reflect a deeper, more severe impulse.  Inspired by the miracle of the New Year.

It was Benjamin Franklin who wanted to achieve moral perfection.  He defined moral perfection this way:  “Resolve to perform what; you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.”  In his epistle to the Romans, St. Paul described what Franklin experienced and what we annually experience with our New  Year’s resolutions:  “The good that I would do, that I do.” not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

So, on this new year inspired by something I call New Year’s Day ambition surrounded by  “floppy” morals I am convinced we are more confident looking back on our efforts to fulfill our New Year resolutions; even if we fall short, we are better men and women for having resolved to try.      Happy New Year!!