Take out your old calendar and flip through the past 12 months. Reflect on this past year. As I do so, I see how God has carried me through what has been a surprising, sometimes painful, but always redeeming journey.

As we begin 2011, we wonder what is coming our way. Some things are clearly coming. A wedding perhaps? The birth of a new baby, or a child leaving home for college? Other events are going to come your way that are going to catch you by surprise.

What can we do? Certainly we believers are always hopeful. We shouldn’t be fatalistic, for our confidence is based on a certainty, an outcome that we know will “result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7).

Remember we have been born into a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (verse 3 of that same chapter).

Here is a verse that comes to me as firm, fatherly correction when I am tempted to fear the future. Can you hear the loving sternness in these words?

“Listen to me…you who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:3–4).

In the new movie True Grit, as the young, snake-bitten Mattie was being carried through the dark night in the arms of Rooster Cogburn to safety, the sad sweet strains of an old familiar hymn played.

What have I to dread, what have I to fear,

Leaning on the everlasting arms?

I have blessed peace with my Lord so near

Leaning on the everlasting arms.