New Year, New Hope

A new year just around the corner.

Our early marriage years were marked by my husband's keen desire to educate me on the greatness of science fiction television and we filled our honeymoon years with stories of Jean-Luc Picard and Captain Janeway. Like a ship boomeranging around a planet or star, we find ourselves once again flung into the great unknown: to boldly go where no man has gone before. It should be exciting. It should fill us with wonder and maybe even a tinge of nervousness. And yet as I look around me and listen to the undercurrents of conversation, I sense a lot of despair and an air of fatalism that is concerning. Instead of hope, I see exhaustion. People are burnt out, on-edge, and like string so tightly strung they seem as though they might snap. Is this truly how we start a new quarter of a century?  

Over the years as a stay-at-home mom, New Years Day has lost some of its shininess. I face it with a more rounded perspective and instead of placing all my hopes and dreams on the unknown, I have a bit more humility to recognize that the more I learn the less I know. Life is unexpected, and bad seems to come with the good like a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that is all mixed together. And while that might seem disheartening, I am convinced that without hardships and difficulties, we wouldn't even recognize the good. We'd come to expect it as normal and measure everything by it in small increments of "slightly better" or "slightly worse". Life is messy, and I have no doubt that 2025 will at least be predictable in that sense. But does that give us license to dread? Permission to be anxious? I think not. 

2025 is not only a new year, it is a new quarter—a new leg of the race. For many of us, this is the era of middle age. These are the years that will mark our legacies. And good and bad, we have an opportunity to rise up and be the light in the darkness. I know you've heard it before. We church people have heard it so many times, it can slip off our tongues so quickly that we scatter the seed without ever fully letting it take root in our own hearts. 

But that doesn't make it any less true. 

Our circumstances don't define our legacy. What we build, create, or pass on to our children don't define our legacy. It is how we face the good and the bad, how we shine when others burn out, how we press on when others give up, how we continue to hope when things seem ever darker. What we pass on to our children is not brick and mortar—the things we can touch and see. Those things are temporary and fleeting and will disappear in one generation or the next. Instead, we pass on a spiritual legacy of faith. We pass on the eyes that see beyond the veil and hope against all hope because of the One we love. 

I know that many of us are weary. Some of us feel pressed and crushed, persecuted and abandoned, struck down and nearly destroyed. But our feelings don't define reality. The next 25 years are our time to build not only for our own sake, but for the sake of those who come behind us. The time for mourning is over, the time for sleeping is behind. Rise up, shake off the dust from your feet, and let's get back to training for war. 

I have a feeling we're going to need it. 

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
—Ephesians 5:14b