c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With our youngest son in New York City with his brothers for New Year’s Eve near Times Square, my wife and I enjoyed the lower-key delight of redoing three rooms in our home.

As recommended by a Web site, we emptied one room, moved back only what seemed needed, focused on its completion, and then started another room. In the end, each room seemed fresh. Even well-traveled furniture took on new life. Some furnishings were tagged for larger life elsewhere.

Life isn’t that simple, of course. We can’t just empty the rooms containing our careers, political problems, economic worries, overseas wars, divided churches, school assignments, or whatever for each of us goes “bump in the night.”

The well-traveled, however, can take on new life. By the grace of God and some letting-go on our part, we can make over some rooms and, through retaining the needed and focusing on completion, muster the wisdom and courage to make over other rooms.

We might remember 2006 as the “Year of the Bully.” Large forces _ politicians, religious leaders, institutions, terrorists, commerce _ tried to convince us that we were powerless, that their momentum was unstoppable. Our fates, they wanted us to believe, are in the hands of those with real expertise, power, determination or righteousness.

Those were lies. We aren’t helpless.

We have as much potency as we dare to claim. Not the potency to play basketball like a teenager again, perhaps, or to return to age 25 to start an entirely different career, or to buy an entire houseful of new furniture, or to single-handedly declare an end to this war or that corruption.

But we have freedom to be, to think, to imagine, to believe and to love. We are God’s partners in creation, not mindless subjects needing experts and religious warriors to tell us what to do.

What I see in my travels is a constant bubbling of what the Gospel of Luke calls “expectation.” People expect something of their lives, their partnerships, their jobs, their nation and their faith. They might have given up on their neighborhood church, current employer or political officeholders. But they haven’t given up on life.

In our expectations and yearnings, we are open to suggestion as to where hope lies. Many will step forward and offer easy answers. From voting to shopping to believing, someone will have an answer for making 2007 a great year. Mostly, their answers garner them money and power, and know nothing of the rooms we actually inhabit.

If last year was the “Year of the Bully,” perhaps 2007 can be the “Year of Personal Strength,” or what Time Magazine heralded as a time of “You,” that is, “persons,” not institutions.

This can be the year when we stop listening to those phony messiahs who slap a spiritual label on bigotry, power and privilege and call it “biblical truth.” We can listen less blithely to politicians, experts and institutional managers whose primary goal is to render us compliant.

Instead, we can claim the potency that is ours by the grace of God, not by anyone’s credentialing or permission. With that potency, we can stand up to the forces of darkness, work with God and each other to freshen our “rooms,” and “take back the night” from bullies and charlatans.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

KRE/PH END EHRICH

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