This is the audio of my reading a poem God gave me to share at the conclusion of the Sunday morning worship gathering of the Deer Run Church of Christ on New Year’s Eve 2017.

On this final day
of twenty-seventeen.
Many will wonder,
“what did it all mean?”
There will be some things
that made no sense at all.
The appearance would say,
we did stumble and fall.

Then there were others
that weren’t quite as planned.
Yet we made it through them,
by God’s unseen hand.
After we look back
and have asked ourselves why.
It’s time to look forward
with a wide-open eye.

An eye that’s Observant
is a good place to start.
To pay close attention
to what’s in my heart.
To look with great Purpose;
to help, not condemn.
When my eye gazes outward
to focus on them.

And as I look forward,
I Expect God to act.
For the good of His people,
and that is a fact.
But perhaps most important,
is to see the great Need.
My eyes long for Jesus
and His healing indeed.

Some of the answers
that we still do seek.
Might lie in the future,
if we could take a peek.
Or perhaps we have missed it,
and just didn’t see.
That the answer God’s giving,
is to create a new me.

© 2017 by Tom Lemler