A new year prayer
The prayer
Lord, another year has started, and I have already made the list of things I know I will not keep all the way.
I am not asking for an easy year. I am asking that if I fail, I fail early, and that I start again the following week and not next January.
Keep the people who were with me in the year that ended. And if somebody does not reach the end of this one, let me have said what needed saying while there was still time.
The year is yours. I am only passing through it.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer for the turn of the year. It was written for this site and it is signed. It does not promise a better year: it asks that when you slip you start again the following week rather than waiting for next January. Below it, what the Christian calendar does with the date.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
At midnight, either side of it, and again in the first days of January — which is when the list of resolutions is still standing and has just begun to creak.
The new year resolution has a well-known defect, and it is not weak willpower. It is the scale of the commitment. Someone who promises to change everything from Monday builds a rule so rigid that the first slip topples the whole thing — and once toppled, the next available marker for starting again becomes January of the following year. Eleven months of waiting because of a stumble in February. That is what the second stanza answers by asking to fail early and start again the week after.
The third stanza does something almost no new year prayer has the nerve to do. The turn of the year is the date when people most think about who died in the year just ended, and it is also when you notice that the list of people nearby has changed. Saying so is not morbid: it is what Scripture does when it compares a life to a mist. The practical conclusion James draws is not fear — it is urgency about what you still have to say to somebody.
The last line sums up what this page offers instead of a declaration. The year is neither a blank sheet you fill by force of will nor a sentence already written that you merely serve out. It is borrowed time, with some things in it that depend on you and a great many that do not. Praying at the turn is mostly the work of admitting which side of that line each item on the list falls.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
For the Church, the year does not begin on 1 January. The liturgical year opens on the first Sunday of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas, which puts the Christian turn in late November or early December. By the time the fireworks go off, the calendar of faith has been running for weeks — a detail almost nobody knows, and one that changes what can reasonably be expected of the date.
English-speaking Christianity has its own new year service, and it is unusually well documented. John Wesley introduced a covenant renewal service in 1755, and the late-night gathering known as Watch Night became a fixture in Methodist and later in many Black church traditions. In the United States the date carries a second memory: on 31 December 1862, congregations kept watch through the night waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect, and that night is still called Freedom’s Eve.
This prayer was written for this site, and that is why it is signed. It is deliberately unsolemn, because the occasion is solemn enough and solemnity is no help here. Anybody praying on the first of January is almost certainly looking at a list of promises they do not entirely believe. A prayer that pretended otherwise would be the only dishonest thing in a night when the person is being honest with themselves.
Little-known details
The verse most printed on new year cards was written for people about to wait seventy years
There is a passage that reads like it was written against the resolution list
What the passages say
10For thus says the Lord: When the seventy years will begin to be completed in Babylon, I will visit you. And I will raise up over you my good word, so that I may lead you back to this place.
11For I know the thoughts that I think over you, says the Lord: thoughts of peace and not of affliction, so that I may give you patience and an end.
Reading the two together restores the weight of the promise. The seventy years come first; the guarantee of a future comes after them, not instead of them. The hope on offer here does not cancel the waiting — it runs through it.
13But who are you to judge your neighbor? Consider this, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into that city, and certainly we will spend a year there, and we will do business, and we will make our profit,”
14consider that you do not know what will be tomorrow.
15For what is your life? It is a mist that appears for a brief time, and afterwards will vanish away. So what you ought to say is: “If the Lord wills,” or, “If we live,” we will do this or that.
The target is a sentence about the calendar, nearly identical to the ones said on 31 December. Note that the suggested correction leaves the plan intact and changes only the verb: there is still a project, there is no longer certainty.
18You need not call to mind the past, nor consider the things of antiquity.
19Behold, I am accomplishing new things. And presently, they will spring forth. With certainty, you will know them. I will make a way in the desert, and rivers in an impassible place.
The instruction not to dwell on former things is addressed to a people whose entire identity was made of memory. It is not an invitation to forget history, but to stop using it as the measure of what can still happen.
1All things have their time, and all things under heaven continue during their interval.
The opening of the chapter most quoted at weddings and funerals works just as well at the turn of the year. The claim is modest and difficult: everything has its time, which implies that some things do not have theirs in January.