It’s been a few months… I’ve missed my time here and the reasons for it are not glamorous. Just, life. So here we are and here I am, saying hello after several months of silence.
I was planning to share a few things I liked and loved in 2023, and what I’m leaning into for 2024. But I’m saving that for another post this week. Today, I have some thoughts on this whole beginning another year and the fact that it is already fraught with so much. It seems everything I read is something along the lines of how awful this year is going to be, and how we need to muster whatever survival techniques we can to make it through.
I’m rejecting that premise.
I was laying awake in bed at 4 a.m. this morning, awake because Zoë had crawled in beside me as she has done every night this week while Josh is away. I had planned (again) to get up early and write, and she had (again) sabotaged that plan as she was definitely not falling back asleep and if she did, by that time I would need to be up and getting the kids ready for school.
So there I was laying awake at 4 a.m listening to little comments about the trees outside and the shadows on the wall as I questioned my purpose in life and my place if any in the world.
A few days before I was driving our oldest to the YMCA where he has been working out while home on his break, and I was telling him about the malaise I hear so much about in his generation. How so many young people his age are losing their desire or drive to pursue or care about anything because of how bleak the world is. Or because of how disappointed and disillusioned they are by institutions and society at large. I was asking him if he felt this at all, or observed it.
I told him about one of my favorite things I heard Sam Allberry say in an interview last year as he looked out on the bleak horizon of a world filled with church scandals, contentious gender and sexuality issues, and a polarized public. He said in effect that he was so grateful to be alive in this moment in history. That he wouldn’t trade it for any other time or opportunity. He was hopeful, even excited. Really? I was kind of shocked to hear him say these things.
His words sounded to me like courage. Like faith that was alive and real and full of expectation, not in victorious political outcomes, but in a bedrock belief that the kingdom of God is among us, and God is at work in the world.
So I tell myself this a lot, sometimes at 4 a.m. when I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, sometimes when I hear news and grow tired of so many people’s opinions, or when the world does indeed seem bleak. Here we are, I think, alive at this moment in history, placed here by no mistake. Let’s not be dismayed by so much bad news, made to believe that this is the worst it has ever been and that too much evil has been let loose in the world. Let’s not think that our days are meaningless because they are small and inconsequential. Let’s not grow weary of believing the good, proclaiming the good, seeking the good, loving the good, even though a lot of good around us appears to be crumbling.
I’ve been reading the prophets (Isaiah over Advent, and now Jeremiah) and for me they are an antidote to either a prosperity gospel on one end, or a nihilist perspective on the other. To read the prophets is to know that God sees it all, and more than that, God deals with it all. But in his own time, and in his own way. The prophets are a double edged sword that cuts both ways— comforting you one moment, and reminding you of righteous judgment the next. You feel both the heat of holy anger and the soft cool breath of mercy. But you certainly don’t get to decide when or how.
While the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah aren’t preached to us and our modern day circumstances, the very same God who inspired those words, and whose character and person they reveal, is the same God who we follow and trust in today. We can learn a lot about who He is, His plans, His way of working in the world, by reading these ancient texts.
So I’m saying in a weird way, these old dudes and their words are giving me kind of hopeful outlook for the New Year. Maybe just the future in general. Not because they tell me anything in particular like when the world will end or what exactly is going to happen with this or that thing, but because they show me what it could look like to live in dark days with eyes wide open (hint: it could look like despair and discouragement), but with a stance that says: I will call things as they are, while refusing to give up hope in God’s good word, and then I’ll wait.
In Jeremiah 17 the weeping prophet hears a word from the Lord, and it has strong echoes of Psalm 1. This is sandwiched in between chapters where Jeremiah writes of his own personal despair, how he want to curl up and die and wishes he could stop speaking the words God gives him to say. But he can’t. It burns within him. And here God tells him to trust and not give up. To be like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. It stands strong and is not withered by circumstances.
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord
He is like a tree planted by water
that send out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green
and is not anxious in the year of drought
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
When I was growing up, we heard a lot about becoming world changers. I hear that language sometimes now too. We throw it around about our kids when we see good qualities or strong leadership and we quip, “she’s going to change the world, that one.” There has been much written about how little world changing my generation has accomplished. It’s all still very much a mess. And my son’s generation doesn’t seem to believe they can have much effect either; many of them have ceased to even care.
I don’t think we should try to change the world, or at least we shouldn’t head out of the gate believing we can. Shouldn’t we just try to faithfully live in it? To be a preserving presence, a balm, a smattering of cracked pots filled with Light?
I appreciated this piece by Samuel D. James, especially the last few paragraphs where he enumerates the ways we shouldn’t be shy about the life-giving reality we have that an upside down world needs to hear. I don’t know when or how the world needs to hear it. I don’t know that we need to obnoxiously shout it, or force others to listen. But we can be strong, immovable oak trees who burst with healthy vibrant life, because we are rooted down into the streams of Living Water. Is that too many metaphors? The point is this: I don’t have a lot of faith in myself or anyone else to fix our problems. But I believe in the kingdom of God among us. So let’s look for ways we can root down and stand firm and give shade and not give up hope. Because God. Because Jesus.
May this year, whatever it holds— be it the valley of the shadow of death, or green pastures— find us firmly planted.
(And may this year also hold for you:
a person who makes you laugh,
a day that catches your breath with beauty,
a friend,
a book that changes you…
And may it hold chocolate, or a piece of raspberry pie, or something non-dairy and gluten free if that’s your thing. Sorry, it gets hard to bless people with too many dietary restrictions:)