Robert Not Bob

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls, now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

I might be a little young for early 70s rock, but I do love me some Three Dog Night.

New Year’s Eve is a special day in the Neill house. In addition to the obvious, it is also the day we celebrate the Lovely Mrs. Neill saying “I Do” to spending a lifetime with a slightly dorky accountant back in the mid-90s. Due to this, my oldest daughter has insisted from a young age that NYE is a family occasion – not one to be celebrated without her and her sister’s presence. NYE 2012 was no exception.

Now how we celebrate each varies and in some years plans don’t gel until the day before or day of NYE. 2012 was one of those years. We had some friends over on the 30th for dinner and they mentioned they were having a little get-together the next night at their house. So the next morning, we pulled together our celebration: NYE Vigil Mass, a nice diner out, and a swing by our friend’s gathering. Well when you wait until the morning of NYE to make dinner reservations, you don’t always get the exact times you want. We ended up with a dinner reservation time that made it impossible to make it to our local parish’s Mass, but we found a time that would work at a neighboring parish.

While selecting a Mass time based on dinner reservations is probably not ideal, sometimes things just work out for the better. The priest at the parish we ended up at was the priest that had guided me through the conversion to Catholicism a decade ago. He always had a way of delivering a message in his homily that resonated with me and his NYE homily was no exception. I am not going to go into the biblical / theological aspect of his homily but his message was one that should hit close to home for most of us.

In two words the message was “Be Joyful.”

We spend too much time in our daily lives focused on the negative and worrying about the bad things going on. We are bombarded with “the negative” from all sides. Our news outlets are constantly hitting us with bad news about death and destruction. Our work days are filled with pressures to perform better on an individual and collective basis. Business leaders are faced with the demands to continually grow revenue and income less face the consequences of falling stock prices. Kids in school are faced with the daily pressures to exceed expectations in the classroom, the playing field, and in the hallway. With all these pressures and negative news, many of us find ourselves not enjoying life. We are constantly worrying about the potential negative things. We are alive, but we are not living.

The message on NYE was simply to enjoy life. Celebrate living each day. Use the talents you have been given to make the world a brighter place. Now that is certainly easier said than done, but I made a commitment right then and there to make it a priority to be thankful each day for having the opportunity to be alive. While I have no doubt that “bad” things will happen in our world and some of those things will hit close to me, my goal is to find joy in each day.

Think what our world would be like if we could all do that every day.