2023 pulls closed its curtains, turns over in the folds of this earth, closes her eyes, and trusts that 2024 will open them in the morning—that the sun will blush, smiling in the face of a new year and white hope, rejoicing in an audacious, universal peace.
Was 2023 a good year? Perhaps the question is posed too simply. Most of us will jump quickly to answer: YES, we’ll smile widely - our holiday high still steady, not to be deterred from its rocket course forward….or NO, we’ll laugh curtly, cutting any further discussion short, though we’ll still smile, satisfied to be here—at the end of it.
Perhaps a better question is, what did this year carry for you, and what are you choosing to continue carrying into this new chapter? 2023 held quite a bit for me. In fact, I think it carried a rather unfair amount for a single year, and the heaviest portion it waited to share in the last leg of the trek. Maybe that’s why I now feel that it was a long year, a slower paced jaunt with time.
Was it good? I think I have to trust that, yes, it was. And it will be.
My goals I accomplished fairly well. My health grew worse, but now we’re healing. My finances were enough. My relationships steadfast. My work fulfilling. My writing…well, we’re here now. :) My life was threatened—causing…deeper resilience? I am still asking.
I sit with these last days of the year and all she was and brought. I will not detail her features, but her characteristics were kaleidoscopic—full, varied, heavy, meaningful. I feel tempted, here in this wilderness of days between Christmas and New Year’s, to feel laden, to choose to carry the experiences, emotions, memories, the late night whys and early morning achings into the blank page of tomorrow.
But I know I am being called to a different choice. One where I acknowledge the colored complexity of this year and all it has brought forth…and in that acknowledgement, choose to trust the One who wrote the notes, composed the lines, and sang the song called life.
Trust is an unnatural choice for us. Our hearts, minds, and earthly sight are all calibrated to the doubts we’ve learned to listen to, the pain we’ve witnessed, and the little walls we’ve built all around us. But that’s where our choice comes in…the choice to choose that gift of heavenly sight that is offered us. The heart of flesh and not of stone. The life of peace that transcends all and every earthly understanding. The hope that defies. The spirit within that knows it belongs to pure and infinite, unstoppable, everlasting light.
Artist Makoto Fujimura says that, “In art, we do not obliterate the darkness,” but that instead, “Art is an attempt to define the boundaries of the darkness.”
Darkness does not…never has…and never will hold me within its own bounds. Hell has no chains that can hold captive a child of God, a redeemed and chosen soul of Jesus Christ. Darkness doesn’t get to silence the breath and voice given me. My life is not my own, and within that reality there is the deepest, and most audacious of freedoms. Freedom to trust, and freedom to live within the bounds of perfect peace.
“If we care to know how deep the suffering of Christ goes—and how vast and even violent is the restoration process through Christ’s suffering—then we had better start with knowing the dark, cruel reality of the fallen world. If we care to embrace hope despite what encompasses us, the impossibility of life and the inevitability of death, then we must embrace a vision that will endure beyond our failures. We should not journey toward a world in which “solutions” to the “problems” are sought, but a world that acknowledges the possibility of the existence of grace beyond even the greatest traumas, the Ground-Zero realities of our lives.” —Makoto Fujimura, “Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering”
We have a choice here in this world, upon the paths of our lives, and within the final hours of each year: what to do with the suffering, the trauma, and the questioning of this fallen, desperate world.
Let’s choose to surrender our futile grasping for fragile control. Let’s choose to embrace trust. To live in the truest of all realities: the reality of eternal, heavenly citizenship—wherein the Prince of Peace reigns sovereign. Over all that has happened. All that this new year will bring. And all that humanity and history can hold.
Here’s to 2023. May she lie down and sleep, knowing she was everything she was meant to be and bear.
Here’s to 2024. May we embrace you fully, hearts full, spirits expectant. Build and till within our ground-zeros the new garden of eden, drenching this world with your Creator’s beauty, His eternal truth, and our Savior’s victory.
Well stated and quite introspective