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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....
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Misunderstood.



I rub sleep out of my eyes on a Thursday morning, but I can’t rub away the sick feeling that he hasn’t texted me back.

I pick up my phone to ask them to pray for me and put it down again. Pain is particular, specific, personal. How do you put your pain in words that mean the same to you as to them? We’re often fighting foggy definitions.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her that being an adult means it’s easy to be unknown. And that it feels better to be unknown than misunderstood.

The world is big. Full of people slipping past the other’s point of view.

She looks at me from the driver’s seat and smiles. “You must get a lot of flack from everyone. You’re a livestock farmer, you’re religious and you hunt.”

I laugh. I also work for a pesticide company, but she doesn’t mention that. It feels good for someone to understand the misunderstood.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her how, at the end of the day, I can come home to an empty house and a soul full of hope in the One whose family didn’t “get” him, who’s friends fled at signs of trouble, and who cried on the cross, “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46).

Hope in the One who endured for me.

Misunderstood.

Hope in the One who understands.

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