Old Truths In A New Year

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Old Truths In A New Year

All our attempts to celebrate New Year’s Eve fell through, so a friend suggested we just celebrate later and call it “Happy Old Year" party. I am VERY into parties that have a dash of strangeness to them, and this excites me more than if our plans had worked out.

It also made me chuckle because it seemed like a nudge of God’s elbow, him once again, in a season of newness, drawing me back to oldness. In church New Year's Eve morning, I kept thinking over and over again how for me, in this season, I do not believe God is calling me to anything new. I think he’s calling me to something old, something eternal.

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Mean January & Gospel-Minded Goals

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Mean January & Gospel-Minded Goals

Annually, I lament the absurdity of following sugary sweet and cuddly December with January's VERY HIGH BAR for all things. The resolutions, the meal-planning, the budgeting, the fitness, the vegetables—I can't take it! I miss you, December!

I only partially mean it. Fresh starts are fun. New Year's Resolutions are noble. But something about January's brand of hustle irks me a bit, and this year I finally figured it out: the things we start must be rooted in Jesus's finished work on the cross. Anything else is asking a goal to be a god.

(Audio file included!)

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

This is the room that would break me, I just knew it. 

I’d been packing up to move with relatively little emotion, but that was because I had not yet ventured upstairs.

If the walls could show you a montage of the life we’ve lived in their midst, you’d see a younger me, showing her friends the room just at the top of the stairs: “This will be a nursery someday!” 

Then you’d see me a little older, sitting in this same room, crying, broken, because “someday” wasn’t today or the million yesterdays before. “Someday” felt like it would never come. 

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