If on the last day of 2024, someone sat you down and read you the story of 2025, would you have believed it?
We’ve all seen the reviews of this year - all of the unbelievable, tragic, and heroic things that have occurred in 2025 - we all have stories to tell of how we lived it.
I know we’re all hopeful that 2026 will be better; that's the nature of hope and longing. But, if 2025 has revealed anything, it’s made us more aware of the reality of our fallen creation.
- Things are not right.
- There is much darkness around us
- And it seems that the best we can do is to shine the light of Christ, if flickeringly, out from our own little corners and pray for his kingdom to come.
- And it is coming - if we have eyes to see, we can catch glimpses of his Spirit moving.
- 2025 is not the end of the story.
- We know the ending - King Jesus will come back and will make ALL things new. We have real, actual hope!
Samwise Gamgee says in The Lord of The Rings:
“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come.”
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:7-9
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
Then in vv 16, 18
Therefore we do not lose heart.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
None of us knows what 2026 will hold... other than
- some good things
- some hard things
- some unexpected things
Stephen Freeman wrote:
"That which is most obvious is never the full story, either about ourselves or others. Christ invites us into the fullness of His life, to live in union with the full story, no matter how deeply it might be hidden. At the very depth of the soul is a song of unbounded thanksgiving."
We are living in our prequel. There is more to come.
Comments