Putting 2012 to bed

                Part of the draw of time-travel stories, movies, television shows is the notion that we can have a do-over. You know, start again. Change things. Do things differently, hopefully correctly.
                Since it’s taken me most of the holiday season to win (judges’ decision) the MMA title fight I had with the flu, I missed most of my reflection time. I wasn’t able to give proper thoughts to the year just past. I spent Christmas Eve, after a service in which I actually thought I was going to pass out, in bed. I spent all of New Year’s Eve in bed.
                But now, I’m mostly alert, mostly healthy and I’m looking back one more time to the year 2012, the year the world didn’t end.
                This will be one of those, if I knew now what I didn’t know then I might not know what I know no and wouldn’t have done any of it kid of things.
                The year 2012 was the year of the big move for my wife, Mary, and I. We moved away further from my life in journalism (as journalism certainly did for many friends of mine who saw their jobs wither, die and disappear).
                We found a new home in Eunice, with tentacles in Iota and Kinder.
                The year 2012  was a bad one by some accounts:
1.       In February, At least  79 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured after a football match in Egypt;
2.       In March, after 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica (of which I had one as a kid) ceased to publish a “print” edition;
3.       The Pinta Island Tortoises became extinct when ol’ Lonesome George, literally the last of its kind, died. And I didn't even know him.
4.       September was the month for terrorist attacks, particularly the U.S. Embassy Libya; October was Hurricane Superstorm Sandy, and the U.N. officially awarded the Palestinians unofficial status; November was Israeli-Hamas escalation of rocket attacks, December was Sandy Hook.
         Mostly bad, it seems. Things we thought would never go away, went away. Things we were sure would never happen again, happened all the more.  And we came close to going over a fiscal cliff, as if I didn’t do that years ago.

Everywhere you look, if you look, things are going less than great. We need, a do-over. A good, old-fashioned I did it wrong, but I’m better now kind of moment.

The question, however, is would we fix things even if we knew what was coming? Would we love more, try harder, think better?

Or is a do-over simply not the answer? We head all the way back to the Garden to find that Adam and Eve knew what was coming if they ate of the fruit, but they did it anyway. Would they have changed if they could see all that was on its way after they ate the fruit? I suspect not.

So, what do we do? Just let the die roll and what will be will be?

Nah. I think that’s what grace is for. We don’t get do-overs. We get grace after we’ve messed up one more time, one more month, one more year. And he grasps us by the shoulders, lifts us cheerfully off the ground, smiles at us and says, “this is enough for you. This is the best I can give.”

Yeah, his grace is sufficient. I hope to exercise all of it I can manage in 2013.