This New Year’s Day morning, the Cornish Times wishes all of our readers happiness and good things to come in 2021.

Thankyou to the Reverend Steve Morgan of St Martin’s Church in Liskeard for the New Year’s message which he has shared with us today.

So, here we are again – the start of a New Year. Fresh, full of possibility and the unknown. Christmas has gone, and whether you did everything on your list of things to do, it is behind you now and you can’t change it. 2020 is over as well – how many of you will be glad to see the back of 2020!

Now, it’s time for a new list – a future of things to do. Some of them urgent, some of them dull, some of them exciting, some of them seemingly insignificant but nonetheless vital.

There will be things you’re raring to get your teeth into, and others that you may have already put off from several previous lists.

In order to make room for the new, there is often a very real need to clear out and rationalise some of the old. Whether that’s having a clean through and removing the children’s clothes that no longer fit or turfing out some old paperbacks to make space for crisp new books; we can’t just keep adding new to old. It simply doesn’t work.

The same of course is true of our lives – whether it’s committing to leaving work early enough to make it home before the children are in bed or taking a cut in hours so you have time to study or train for a new skill: if we want to tackle something new, we have to make a change.

The same is true for our spiritual lives. To spend more time reading the Bible means spending less time doing something else. To give more time to serving God probably means cutting out something you were quite happy doing before. To make space to listen to God and what He would have you put on your New Year ‘to do’ list requires effort and a desire to hear Him.

It means letting prayer be a two-way conversation, which is scary, because what He asks of you may not be what you had planned!

So, as you pause here, hopefully taking a moment to think about all that may be ahead of you in 2021, I want to share with you the words of the American clergyman Phillip Brooks who died in 1893;

“Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.”