I sat in my cozy chair while the rest of the world was dark, quiet, asleep. This is precisely where I want to be when the calendar turns a new year, a new decade, or at least when I wake up to it. I’m a helpless hopeful and days impregnated with all things new are magnetic for me. I will think, dream and resolve at this fresh start disguised as just another day.
Maybe you get it, that same fire flickers in you. Or maybe you don’t. Perhaps you are among the resolute, the stalwart who resolve not to make a single resolution this year. I admire your determination, your, ahem, resolve to not resolve.
There is potential for a degree of silliness on each side of this coin, isn’t there?
Either way, this year my quiet moments were different. I had spent the previous days reflecting, looking back and choosing gratitude. And the culmination of that reminded me, fresh on day one, of a hard truth. Everything that made 2019 difficult, most everything that made it challenging, made it sad and hard, was unresolved. It was all still hard and all still there. That’s a sucker punch to a helium balloon of hope, isn’t it?
The things that made last year hard may be walking right into this new year with you. Health challenges might still be there. Tough marriages might still be tough. Financial strain may still be suffocating. Relational issues may still be grinding. You may still be waiting, still have questions, and still be sitting with the weight of the unknown.
It can be tough to buy the hype of new when the hard of old is still very much with us.
What do we do when we are forced to carry the hard of the past right into the future? How do we proceed when the tears are still fresh, the rough parts aren’t smooth, there is no healing and the unknown and shadowy edges are every bit as real, every bit as scary, as they were the night before? That truth can feel deflating, even for a helpless hopeful.
On September 1st my dad had a heart attack. This seemingly healthy man, who was barely ever sick, had rarely taken a pill for anything, had his chest cut open and spent 45 days in the hospital. The unexpected was demanding and difficult.
He spent the last months of 2019 at home. We enjoyed the holidays with a renewed sense of gratitude for days we know are grace. But the truth is, he is not well.
My dad needs another heart surgery soon. My parents need to move to a bigger city, be nearer to a bigger hospital, for part of the year. The unknown and not easy looms heavy and large.
I’m guessing some of you feel that too in a hundred different, and yet kind of the same, ways.
How do we remain steadfast when everything seems unsteady? How do we hope when nothing seems fixed and simple? What are we to do when the days and weeks ahead, the blank slate, feels less like possibility and promise and more like heavy and hard?
This isn’t the bright and shiny stuff saturating our news feeds as we fill squares on fresh calendars. But for many of us, this is reality. There aren’t simple answers, but there is clear hope. Here are four ways I’m clinging to it.
Seek His Wisdom
It feels likes well intended leaders are selling wisdom from every direction this time of year – ways to crush our goals, to dream big, and turn a new leaf of faithfulness. And much of it may be useful, but before I even stepped foot into 2020 I made up my mind to study the book of James this year. Because in the midst of the hard I desperately want to know more about godly wisdom. James tells us:
“The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruit, without partiality and without hypocrisy.” (3:17)
I’m thirsty for that, friend. I’m ready to step aside from goal-crushing and drink the wisdom that is pure and peaceable, gentle. I need what the Word has to offer far more than what the world has to offer.
We Trust His Mercies
They are new every morning. We know that, right? Smack in the middle of the book of lament, Jeremiah tells us:
“Through the Lord’s mercies were are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘Therefore I hope in Him!” (Lamentations 3:22-24)
Follow his logic, friend. This is what I know, therefore this is what I do. New and fresh in every calendar square, He provides. I believe it. I determine to trust Him with it and for it. At times I have this wandering eye, this wandering heart that gazes ahead and wonders – how in the world? And this is the truth I want to boss myself around with.
We Anchor Deep
A friend sent me a card this fall with those very words, anchor deep. She had no idea how much I would need this straight talk. Because when the waves come we will look to steady ourselves somewhere, somehow. It’s our natural response. Hebrews 6:11, when speaking of the immutability, the unchanging nature of our God, tell us this:
“This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast…”
The Truth of who God is, our hope in His very nature, must be our anchor. Anchor deep, friend.
We offer it all
In the end – trials and waves, blank calendar filled with hope or filled with the heavy – our job is the same. We must surrender it to Him. His ways are not our ways and we know He writes beautiful stories for our good and for His glory. So we beg for wisdom, we trust His mercy, we anchor deep and we offer it all for Him to use and teach and grow us through.
It takes courage, friend. It’s not always intuitive, but it’s always possible. We can learn to count it all joy (James 1:2) because we know, believe and trust, He is doing good work here. And so we’ll thank Him for it. Bravely.
Happy New Year,
Katie
Thank you so much for this post Katie! It really hits home as I am right in the middle of some extremely difficult family situations that has grown increasingly strained and challenging over the past few months. I love the sentence, “ God has deep learning for us in difficult seasons”. Hanging on to this!
You have the talent Katie putting you words together so as paint such a clear picture! I thank you for sharing your blessings, your words have explained any feelings for myself and calmed many worries for me.
Last year was a hard year for me, i set out to find myself. However i found, a few months in, i went about it the wrong way. I wasnt happy with what i was finding so i tried changing myself. I slightly spoke of what i was discovering to a friend and she very strickly told me to stop what i was doing. I hadnt realized until she said it that i was doing harm to myself. My faith was weak and i was trying to control everything around me. So this year i resolved to build on my faith and trust that i am where i am because this is where im needed. And to joyful accept my position.
God Bless you and your family Katie! Thanks for continuing to encourage even when you are traveling tough roads. It takes a strong, faithful woman to do it!
Thank you for this timely post, Katie. Although I didn’t exactly resolve to not make resolutions, complacency overtook me, and no resolutions emerged. This was largely from a sense of hopelessness resulting from some tough situation over the past year. But deep down, I know it isn’t hopeless at all. That the Lord will give me what I need to make it through the days, months and weeks of 2020, with all its new challenges, heartaches and joys. He is faithful. And I am thankful that in Him we can anchor deep.
Watching you live this is *beautiful* and love you, friend.
I needed to read again the verses in Lamentations 3. The past three years have been hard for me. In 2016 there were the deaths of my mother, mother-in-law and moving my dad out of the family home into a retirement community. Losing the house part was a bigger grief because my ‘home base’ was now gone. I have lived in Australia for 47 years and always had the security of knowing I was able to come ‘home’. The last two years I buried my older brother, was by the bedside of a dear friend when she died, had two uncles die, buried my father and just learned of the death of the minister who married me and my Australian husband. I need to remember that God’s mercies are new every morning and look for those mercies instead of looking back on the hard times. Thank you for your honesty in your blogs!
Wow, Marji. Doing the math backward and looking at all the suffering is kind of overwhelming, isn’t it? But on this side of the screen I see you still standing through all of that, still being held through all of that and still trusting Him mercy is present through all of that. That is equally overwhelming. You are living a powerful testimony of His sustaining grace, Marji. Keeping pressing in. I’m praying for you. ~Katie
The timing of this post is impeccable for me. I spent New Year’s Eve of 2018 dreaming up a 2019 that was going to restore a mysterious health issue I was having. It was going to be the year the doctors figured me out, treated me, and off I’d go just as healthy as I’d been before the whole thing started. But 2019 turned out to be the year I continued to suffer, and drs continued to scratch their heads…and guess what. Spoiler alert here- I’m not healed. I’m not better. Possibly feeling worse in just this second week of January. So as I sat in my couch with my husband and 3 young children on New Year’s Eve of 2019, I just prayed that God would be near this year. That he’d walk with me. Continue to help me wait with patience. 2020 may or may not be the year that we figure out what is going on with my body, but I do have a feeling it’s a year that’s going to find me in the Word more. Letting go of the control I wish I had and handing it all over to Him.
Such good and hard growth, Lauren. It takes courage to say – I’m not chasing after an end result (while we would very much like that end result) I chasing after you, Lord. He has our good in mind, friend. And we’ll keep trusting Him with our stories. <3