“Hello twenty-twenty. I’m not sure how I feel about you quite yet. This first day of a new year always holds so much promise, and yet with all your anxious intentionality, the days ahead are anything but firm in your grasp. You may pray for healing and are met instead with what you feared. You may give the whole of yourself to your work and it betray you. You may share your heart and your words are met with disdain. To embark in a new year should be less about goals and ambitions, fine as they are in their own right, and more about how you love in the day you have been given. For if there is one thing I can take from this last year, it is that there is too much heartache to stop at loving yourself.”
These words were carved out rather quickly on social media while I sat gazing out at the Michigan landscape, en route home after an overwhelming month of travel. Time away often brings with it both the sense of rest and hurry all at once. Perhaps not simultaneously, but always in consecutive moments. Sipping a cup of coffee in front of the pellet stove, and in the next minute, scouring every corner for toys and pacifiers so as not to leave any remnants of our visit behind. In that familiar car ride home there has always been a point where I find myself needing to settle my head, so to speak, into what awaits us. Meetings and laundry, email and people; whatever routine, whatever relationships, whatever challenges that will soon need tending to for the brief time they went relatively ignored. I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but I can only imagine it to be a post-vacation syndrome of sorts that everyone deals with at some level. This “getting back into life” bit that takes some mental shifting. Although this time it all felt a bit, well, different – where the normalcies that would need my attention were all but in a state of normal. Transition the current placeholder and nothing readied to last. I found myself overwhelmed by a great sadness. Afraid to hope too deeply. Hesitant to dream too expectantly. Rather than excited at what will undoubtedly be another beautiful juncture of purpose and reliant obedience, the way seemed rather frail and wearying. Knowing full well that longing and disappointment are all too possible and guarantees are rather hard to come by.
Hello twenty-twenty. How could I possibly be sure how to feel about you when I cannot yet look back and reflect on you? When you could carry great passion in your gait and reveal yourself to be a year of plenty. Yet you are all too capable of sorrow and prolonged yearning. In scrolling through Instagram posts, parallel futures were looking luminous with ambition and high expectation all crammed into posts with plastic fringe hats and party horns. We are quick to romanticize what we do not yet know, and latch almost desperately onto the hope of what could be. Because of course why mourn the untold stories before their time? Better to anticipate than to dread, or so we assume.
Though maybe, just maybe, a bit of dread is warranted. Or at least, a gentle reminder that you cannot account for the unknown by mere hopefulness. Perhaps we would be wise to take the pressure off our weary minds, in their dream-laden attire, and remind them that disappointment, discouragement, and even despair are bound to present themselves. Maybe then your New Year resolutions would look a bit different. You would look first to love well, to grow in courage, to find faith, to seek wisdom. You would embrace your children more intentionally and even approach your job more gratefully. You would remember your story and you would look to discover others. Not so as to live out of a fear for what might be lost, but with a simple readiness to confront the brokenness, and if not in your own life – if 2020 indeed proves itself a year of plenty – then in the lives of others. For indeed, there is too much heartache to stop at loving yourself.
EXPOSITION: Consider your story. Recognize your deepest joys. Draw up unwanted sorrows. Remind yourself of ambitions met with disappointment and yearnings met with success. Consider the people who most profoundly influenced your story.
DENOUEMENT: No need to change your resolutions or diminish your excitement for unknown ventures, but perhaps add a subheading to all your ambitions. How will you grow in your character? How will you seek to serve the broken? How will you ready yourself for the unknown?
RISE: “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world” -Jesus