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2
Corinthians 5:17 Contemporary
English Version
17 Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new
person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new.
This is a new year. I have had serious reservations about
what this year 2025 would bring. Our country has been divided worse than
anytime since the Civil War. Only time will tell whether we can ride the crest
of this wave or be drowned by it. The past is indeed being swept aside.
On the other hand, life rolls on. We have a water leak in
our front yard that threatens to drain the Colorado River dry. But we will take
care of that. We have a Better Than 50 Club meeting in a mere fortnight. But
members will rise to the occasion. My computer, on which I am typing this, is
showing more and more serious signs of rolling over and playing dead. But my
brother gave me a little computer for Christmas.
When I say little, I mean tiny: it is less than 3½ inches
square and 1½ inches high (less than 9 x 9 x 4 cm) Yet it is 500,000 times more
powerful than the computer I used during my doctoral research at the University
of Iowa that occupied a whole floor of one of the large buildings on campus,
and had dozens of people running it. In less than an hour I transferred onto it
more than 100,000 times the total capacity of data that IBM 360 could hold.
I am already polishing off the final chapter of my Ikizu
Memoirs book on this Ace Magician. And, yes, with Sylvia’s help we have all
but completed the equatorial African experience of our lives, so that part of
our past is history and forgotten only in the sense that we no longer are living
it.
God has had His hand in our lives through out our whole
existence. We are definitely new persons, but in this case “new” includes “old”
in it! Yesterday my Standard 1 grade school teacher Ruth (Miss Hurlow) Webster
and her husband Eric came by our home. She will be 100 years old this year. I
had found some pictures of their wedding (in 1950) that my dad had in his
collection and gave them to her. I was in Standard 1 (= Grade 3) that year!
Thank You, Lord, for making us new persons—we look
forward to the finished product when You come again.
Here is a wedding picture of Eric and Ruth Webster in 1950
