Happy New Year! 2025, what a time to be alive? My first post of this new year… my first post in quite some time… the focus is my word of the year. But for starters I want to acknowledge the posture I am holding and using to pray over my life. A perspective I hope to hold for the rest of my years: life is a gift.
It is this feeling that found me in 2024 after being allusive for a few other seasons of life. It is a feeling that ignited with the introduction of such little and simple life moments, and were stoked by the realizations this feeling would never have arrived without the barely surviving chapters. A feeling that demands admiration for how powerful life is because it is so fleeting, while also a calmness to not waste it a way with worry of not living it well enough. Life is a balancing act… with the true secret being: balance doesn’t exist.
This past year has gifted and taught me so much that I wasn’t able to begin to process it with writing. That truth pains me and challenges that whole “living well” perspective because I treasure my documented experiences and believe they motivate a resolve to be more present in life. But 2024 taught me more about letting go then anything else and the shocking result was how much fuller my heart and life become because of it. So I let go of the disappointment in not writing and embrace all that I hope to share going forward. However a new caveat: God is the author. I have always known it…. I have done my best to seek it…. but it’s in the here and now that I am experiencing it and that is worth writing. What a time to be alive.
How does one approach a year with this new viewpoint? When the years of hope, humility, joy, obedience, and others have already passed by- what is left that hasn’t been done? What is it that He is ordaining? More: more faith, more love, more trust, more hope …. living with more, because God has a plan …. God has made me for a reason… God has given me a purpose. And 2025 word is here.
This one does require an extra special set of training wheels though. A lot of my healing season has been from the demands and problems caused by perfection. And purpose has the ability to trick me into desiring to live perfectly. And yet the problem is also the anecdote: perfection causes me to miss out on real, authentic, openness to unknowns, to the roles of loved ones if I let them. My purpose isn’t to be perfect, it’s to be in this life and in each moment as best I can.
That definition of purpose requires me to step away from ideals, to step out from over analyzation, and into the moment exactly as it is presented. My role is to do my best to see God’s truth of each moment and then to be calm, slow, and focused enough to chose what I think he is calling me too. This is life changing, especially when pushing harder, pulling up by my bootstraps to keep going, and out working my disappointments has gotten me this far. And yet, purpose is the salve for that too: I can build on that foundation. Do not keep it exactly as is and do not dare to throw it out, build on it. And purpose will help the building to be properly directed.
What a time to be alive and in this 2025 I will have the chance to celebrate 40 years alive…. 25 learning my professional industry… 15 being married… 5 being a mom… and 2 in this newly specific chapter. Those numbers are sometimes surprising by their size, and yet remind me of the privilege of still learning in every single area. Life is never about making it, it is about learning to be made and remade a new, hopefully with purpose.
May you all be blessed with lives full of new seasons… new lessons … and more growth. Happy New Year, what a time to be alive!
Thank you so much for reading and remember to make it a great day!
Jackie
Have A Little Faith in We 