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| "Sometimes being in a place is too painful so you decide to go on a walk instead" |
A new year is a funny thing. For some, it represents hope, desire, and a longing for things to be better. For others, loss, letting go of things behind, and moving forward. This year though, for me and likely for many, many others, it is little more profound than an arbitrary way of marking our planet completing another revolution around that big firey ball of gas in the sky while reflecting on how the previous 12 months completely and utterly failed to live up to the hopes and expectations we set for them.
Now, don't get me wrong, 2025 hasn't been all bad. There have been plenty of moments from the last year that I look back on now with real thankfulness and joy, and plenty more that have profoundly impacted me in a positive way. I've joined a small group, served on several different teams across multiple contexts, and organised and helped run many different events, the most significant of which was a charity video game marathon that raised over seven thousand dollars. On top of all that, this year marks the first time in a very long time that I have genuinely felt at home in a community, and that I might actually belong somewhere rather than just existing on the fringes all the time, and that to me is a really really big deal. Despite all these things though, I can't help but looking back on the year as a whole as something of a catastrophic failure.
I haven't really engaged with the concept of "new years resolutions" for a while now. All too often they just start out as good intentions which then fall flat after the first week or month with nothing to support them. Honestly, I've never been particularly good at motivating myself to do anything without a clear, well defined goal to work towards that is external to myself. Generic "self improvement" has never really been a good enough reason by itself to elicit meaninful change, and thus, it hasn't really made sense to me to set myself goals like that. For the last few years though, one thing I have been doing is praying into a specific word or phrase to represent the year ahead, and for 2025 that word was "Release".
Of course, when I prayed that prayer, I had no idea that the "release" in question would involve a year of feeling totally overwhelmed and needing to take a pretty significant step back from several areas of ministry in order to properly re-evaluate where and what I have capacity for, as well as the end of postgrads with the departure of our pastor, and the disappointing but not remotely surprising news that The Equip Festival (and by extension puppet academy) would not be going ahead in 2025. Nothing on this list really came as a "surprise" as such, but even still, everything happening at once ended up being quite a shock to the system, and one that I hadn't really anticipated. The phrase "bumpy road" doesn't quite do this year justice. A better descriptor would likely be "road closed - follow diversion [through several miles of roadworks]". Only time will tell whether that diversion actually landed me where I need to be...
All that brings me onto the year ahead, and where we go from here. I haven't usually been making a habit of sharing these "words for the year" with other people, because a lot of the time they're pretty personal and if things don't come through it can end up feeling fairly meaningless. In the case of 2026 however, I've been feeling for a while now that the word that I need to be praying into for this year is the word "Resolution", and honestly, it feels like it's a word that demands a certain level of accountability, so here we are. With all that in mind though, the question then becomes: why "resolution"? What does it mean, and what does it mean for me to be praying into it?
Interestingly, the word "resolution" actually has several meanings:
- A firm decision to do (or not do) something
- The act of finding an answer or solution to a conflict or problem
- The disappearance of a symptom or condition
- The smallest interval measurable by a scientific instrument
- The degree of detail visible in a photographic or television image
- The passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony
There are plenty more definitions I could list here, and I'm not going to go into depth about all of them, or how specifically they relate to me personally, because we would be here all day, but what I will say is that the more I look into it, the more this word feels particularly apt for the situation I find myself in entering 2026, and I don't think it's an accident that this word specifically is the one that has been on my heart for the last 4 months. Ultimately, my prayer is that 2026 would be a year of:
- Choosing decisiveness over indecision
- Finding peace and comfort in the face of endings
- Healing and letting go of past hurts
- Rediscovering clarity and direction
- Rebuilding and restoring relationships
Honestly, as I write this now, I have no idea what this year will look like. Heck. I'm not even entirely certain what the rest of this week will look like, and there's only another three days of that left... The one thing I can be pretty dang sure of though is it's going to be a pretty wild ride, whatever direction life ends up going in in the next 12 months, and I don't think I can do it on my own. To quote another post I wrote just under five years ago now: "In a world where everything we’ve ever known is breaking we have a simple choice: Hold onto God and His promises and ride the wave, or break with it."
Onward and upward to 2026 I guess!
