Time flies. I mean, it’s December 31st already! Wasn’t it only yesterday that we were writing 2024 for the first time? In the words of the great philosopher Dr. Seuss, “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness, how time has flown. How did it get so late so soon?”
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis records the fictional correspondence between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his diabolical understudy, Wormwood, as to how to become successful as a tempter. Screwtape offers his nephew pithy advice on how to corrupt the man in question about his thinking about time, “You must zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ The assumption that you want him to go on making is so absurd that, once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of evidence in its defense. The man can neither make nor return, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift.” C.S. Lewis continued in his whimsical yet serious fashion of challenging our human preoccupation with “ownership,” as evidenced in Screwtape’s extensive use of the possessive pronoun “my”—my boots, my body, my children, my family. In Screwtape’s words, “The joke is that the word “mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.” We don’t own anything. The Bible calls us stewards (1 Peter 4.10). Everything we own is on loan from God.
Today’s prayer is appropriate to the last day of the year. It was included in a 1695 book of German prayers as a collect (brief prayer) for the New Year: