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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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Beneath the waters.


She’s just a little girl. Eleven maybe. She steps cautiously into the baptismal tank.

“I gave my life to Christ when I was three,” her voice shakes as she looks down at the notes in her hands.

I was three too.

I blink hard as her tiny figure blurs. I was eleven too when I stood waist deep in that pond behind our country church. “Do you believe Jesus died for you, Kate?” Mr. Weber had asked, seriously. “Do you believe he rose again and that, by His grace, you’ll spend eternity with him?”

I remember looking around at the people standing on the bridge, at the twins standing on the shore, at the four blond kids sitting on the dock. “Yes.”

I knew nothing then. But I knew everything I needed to know.

The little girl at the front of the church continues reading. Her voice quickens at the paragraph where her mom leaves them. She looks up from the paper and takes a deep breath and recites that familiar passage. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want (Ps. 23:1).” The comfort that was with her when her mom wasn’t.

I wipe my eyes. It’s the same verse I texted my friend that morning.

And just last week, I told her that I’m excited about my 25th birthday in four days. How this year has been the best yet.

Not because I did things better or different.

Because I lived repentance.

How I got off a return flight from Iceland and looked in my bathroom mirror and said goodbye to that bit of myself that’s been lingering for twenty years.

I stopped hugging the cross with one hand and holding my desires with the other.

I watch the little girl fall beneath the waters.

I know that, through the confusion of high school and the pressures of university and the lure of success, she’ll be just fine.

And maybe she too will sit in the middle row of church on the eve of her 25th birthday and feel as if she’s being plunged beneath the waters of grace.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Is. 43:19 



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