Well, friends, it is 2021 and I still don’t have a flying car in my driveway. I’m not complaining, just saying. I can hear the fireworks in the distance an hour after midnight and I still have not yet been to the moon despite the fact that I read the book, “You Will Go To The Moon” by Mae and Ira Freeman when I was six years old and believed that it was predicting my future. As far as I know, there is no space station orbiting the earth with the primary purpose of serving as a way station and place to change space ships for tourists heading to the moon.

I’ve been celebrating New Year’s Eve on East Coast time for several years - a feat made even easier this year by our move to Pacific Time Zone. It was 9 pm local time when the ball dropped in Times Square in New York City. I didn’t watch it. I was watching my nephew build a Lego set on a Twitch livestream, which is a bit like YouTube, but not quite the same. He had a pretty big crowd of followers - more than the number who would show up to church in the congregation I served before Covid. Then again, his followers don’t have to go anywhere to watch. The application is specifically designed to play in the background on your computer or tablet so that you can have it on and sort of pay attention to it while you are doing something else. I didn’t have much “else” to do, sitting in my La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the fireplace and chatting with my wife and sister. I topped off my evening with a dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream before turning in a little after ten. Then again I’m up a little after 1 am to publish my journal entry and my nephew is still working on his Lego set. He’s building the 2,646-piece Lego Nintendo Entertainment System kit complete with a console, controller, cartridge and, of course a television set: Legos specifically designed for those 18 years old or older. He’s figured out a way to earn money while playing video games and is very entertaining as he does it.

Still, there’s no flying car in my driveway. 2021 certainly seemed like the distant future when I was a kid. It seemed pretty far away when I was the age my nephew is today. He hadn’t even been born when I was his age. For me the future seems to have arrived. I’m retired. I’m loving being a grandpa. But I don’t have tickets for a trip to the moon. If I did, the flight probably would have to be cancelled due to the pandemic anyway.

The power of the human imagination is incredible. Our capacity for creative thinking is genuinely amazing. 25 years ago, computer game players and engineers designed the Nintendo 64 video game console. It was a breakthrough with its 64-bit central processing unit. But those brilliant engineers probably could not have envisioned that one day adults would entertain themselves by building a Lego model of the console. And they certainly didn’t imagine that they would do so in front of a green screen while chatting with their followers over a social networking platform and understanding what they are doing as building community.

Here we are. 2021. It isn’t quite the way I imagined it would be when I was 10 or 20 or even 50 for that matter, though by that age I’d pretty much given up on owning a flying car or traveling to the moon. These days I’d be satisfied with a self-driving car that would allow me to keep driving after I lose the ability to safely navigate city traffic. I’m pretty sure that someone has already designed the experience of a flying car and a trip to the moon that can be had by putting on a virtual reality headset. I don’t have a VR headset and didn’t have an Oculus Quest 2 on my Christmas list this year. I’ve been led to believe that such things can result in dizziness and nausea anyway.

I’m quite enough entertained by watching my nephew on Twitch and reading the latest Sherman Alexie book on my iPad. Then I nap for a couple of hours and get up to write my journal on a laptop computer that has more computing power than the entire moon launch team had at their disposal. Things haven’t turned out the way I imagined, but some of those things are far more fantastic than I was able to imagine.

I welcome the new year as I have welcomed other new years with a sense of excitement about new things that are emerging in my family, in our community, and around the world. We’ll be inaugurating a new president in 20 days. It probably isn’t quite as dramatic as those in Great Britain waking to their new Brexit reality this morning. We don’t have new words to our national anthem like Australia does today. Still, I suspect that there will be plenty of change. After all I didn’t see the pandemic that has killed 1.4 million people worldwide coming. I didn’t know how much it would change our lives and affect the way we form communities. I didn’t expect to learn much about social media in the final months of my active working career. Things don’t always turn out the way you expect and there is always something new happening. 2021 will surprise me in good and bad ways I’m sure.

Happy New Years to you. May you find joy in the midst of change and disruption, peace in a wild and sometimes violent world, hope when others flirt with despair and love enough to keep you engaged in reaching out to others through whatever media is available.

As for me, I’ve only retired from my former job, not from life itself. I’ve got nieces and nephews and grandchildren to keep me young. And if I get bored in my retirement I can always build a Lego set.