The time between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a little bit of heaven, a week in which I find it difficult to do anything except read. I always think of projects to do during this week, but I confess that I scarcely ever complete any of them – it’s such a wonderful week just to reflect on the year gone by and the year upcoming.

I always read the Dave Barry “Year in Review” column that appears in the Washington Post magazine – I try to get to it before Linda so I don’t have to wait and listen to her chuckle and laugh out loud as she goes through it. She’s too polite to read parts of it to me out of context, because they’re never as funny as they are in the original. But I’m not too polite to do that if I get it first.

This is the week that all the stories come out on the “Best of…/Worst of …” for the year or the decade, century or millennium. The Best Movies/Worst Movies -- it turns out I usually haven’t seen any of them and this year is no exception. The Best Dressed/Worst Dressed – usually I don’t know any of the people either. (Who is Kate Gosselin and why should I care about her?) And invariably, someone or something on one person’s “Worst” list is on another person’s “Best” list.

That may highlight my main problem with Best and Worst lists -- I am never sure what the best and worst things are. Is the current recession a good thing? Probably not, but what was being produced when the economy was booming turns out to have been mislabeled packages of debts that companies could buy and sell and even insure, but never collect. Those packages turned out not to be things anyone wanted a closet full of when the music stopped playing, as it always does.

For some reason, the quote (above) from the story of the rich, young ruler came to mind as I thought about this. Only God is truly good, even “Best.” Everything else is something less, something broken, something limited. Like any good Trinitarian, I’ll exclude the Son of Man from the list of things and people that are of this world and therefore share in its imperfections.

Why is this important? Especially around the holidays, we see advertisements for cars or cell phones or computers or diets that are “the Best” of whatever they are. It certainly makes sense to compare things and try to get better products and better values, things that are more reliable, more ecologically friendly and so on. But we should keep in mind that the Best really is yet to come. We see only through the glass darkly that which we will someday know whole, complete and truly perfect.

The other thing to think about is how limited our perspective is. Many things that seem to be very good turn out to be very bad (this year’s credit default swaps turn out to be next year’s toxic assets). Many things we think are very bad turn out to be very good – people who worship a God who dies on a cross should be distrustful of appearances of success or failure.

So, if I wish you “All the Best” for the coming year – and I do, of course – you all know Who that is, and was, and always will be. Amen!

Pastor Greg