SubscribeNew Year Eve’s Watch Night Service
Tonight I will be ringing in 2010 with prayer and praise at the Dayspring Community Church. Our Watch Night service will be a lively time of testimony, praise, prayer and worship as the clock ticks into a new decade. For me, it’s better than watching the ball drop in Times Square, lifting a glass of champagne at the midnight hour or joining in singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
It wasn’t always that way. I have had my share of New Year Eve parties with dance and revelry and even enjoyed quiet evenings at home to reflect and offer a moment of prayer. I have like many others I’ve noticed over the years, gone to a New Year Eve’s service and then afterwards hustled over to a celebration-in-progress.
I grew up attending rambunctious, spirit-filled Watch Night services on New Year’s Eve, before putting the tradition aside for several years as I let my church attendance slip and my faith falter. But now the thought of doing anything else gives me great pause. Watch Night service helps center me between gratitude for past trials and blessings and a God-infused hope for the days ahead. It’s the best way I know to start a New Year.
My pastor, Rev. Dr. Cynthia T. Turner, calls Watch Night Service “the ultimate year-end opportunity.” She has been excited about this evening’s service, which we will have in our own meeting place this year. For the past few years, our congregation has joined with other churches for worship and fellowship. The services have been crowded and spirited, with plenty of well-wishes and food afterwards. Being back at the home church will make it all the more special as a our growing congregation gathers as a family to celebrate this year’s victories.
“When we come together tonight, it will be an opportunity to look at what God has brought us through,” she tells me. “Through empty hopes, through unstable relationships and bad marriages, through surgeries and medical tests, through loneliness and insecurity, through addictions and abuses, through trials and court cases, through unpaid bills, job loss and foreclosures, and, most importantly, through a time when we did not know God to a time when we realize if it had not been for God we’d still be lost.”
She says she realizes in some instances, people may not be totally through the ordeals she mentioned. “Nevertheless,” she continues, “our Watch Night testimony is still a shout of victory that we’re farther along than we were when we started. It’s a “still in the game” testimony that declares we have not been counted out and since we’re still here, we may as well take this opportunity to praise the One who allowed us this space and place on planet earth.”
What spiritual practice do you have for ringing the New Year?
BTW: If you are interested in the history of the Watch Night service check out this.
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