I was pedalling away to an audiobook on my exercise bike late last year when an author challenged me to ‘grieve my losses’. I dismissed the invitation. First, I was on an exercise bike. Second, no losses came to mind. 

But the author was insistent. 

At the beginning of the book (Resilience by John Ortberg), Ortberg warned that given the flexibility afforded by the medium, he’d occasionally stray from the original text. This was one of those times. 

He suggested that whether I was mowing the lawn, out running, or on an exercise bike, I should stop what I was doing and reflect on the losses that I may be grieving. Because I’m so sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit in my life, I took that blunt object to the head as a blunter encouragement to open the door to the possibility that there might be a few things I should consider jotting down. Things I was grieving. 

Turns out there was. Nothing life-threatening, but things heavy enough that it didn’t take long before they poured onto paper.

If we paused with honest vulnerability, that might be all of us. A temporary or permanent loss of love or life. A loss of joy or vitality, perhaps a loss of perceived agency or control. Maybe a betrayal or loss of trust. A crisis of confidence, a crossroads in our faith. Heck, maybe all of them.

The challenge wasn’t to ruminate on these losses to the point of paralysis. The invitation was to name and present them before Jesus and confess they were heavy. Cumbersome. Debilitating. Discombobulating. Paralysing, even. But in that grief, to realise that they are ‘handoverable’. There are hands bigger than ours that can exchange our burden for rest. 

In a New Year’s Eve reflection yesterday, I wrote:

There are so many layers of good in the badlands. How’s life? Wonderful and terrible. Sometimes simultaneously, sometimes seasonally, and seldom in solidarity. Rich deposits of gold that slowly become alluvial through formation and excoriation. Sheesh, that sounds grim. Life’s good, yet my anticipation of some sort of utopia in the new creation emerges like streams in the desert more often than a steady deluge (though I’m in no way averse to the joyful repetition of mercy’s waves). But there’s a new thing coming.

For 25 years, I’ve prayerfully ascribed a word to each new year. Mainly, they’ve heightened my radar for what God is doing in and around me. Occasionally, they’ve been miles off, like I was playing a game of opposites with God and being reminded that our attempts at planning can be comedic fodder for Him (Psalm 37:12-13). More often, though, there’s been a deeper prophetic edge—the sense that I’ve been given a sniff of the trail I’m invited to walk. 

This year’s word is ‘newthing’—ok, that’s a compound word, but it’s my little game, so I can bend the rules a little (and it was only a few paragraphs back I used the word ‘handoverable’, so I have pedigree). It’s not a word that I’ve premeditated to forward-engineer. I reflected today that many of my words of the year across the decades probably have this sense of ‘new thing’ about them. Some fresh invitation to that newness we may neither see nor perceive right now but is springing up from this old ground. 

I read a meme yesterday that said:

‘Don’t forget to poo just before midnight on December 31, 2024. 
You don’t want to carry the same old sh*t into 2025.’

That’s a sage summary of what I’ve written here. The newness we’re offered in Jesus isn’t limited to a specific moment on the calendar. Yet, I also know these punctuation marks afford us a then/now moment. Some losses span those periods, yet we’re still granted the privilege of assessing and grieving them proactively. Most times, old things need to be grieved before new things can be embraced. Good things.

I’m not pretending that grieving is easy. Or quick. Or perfunctory. It wouldn’t be much of a loss if it were any of those. But perhaps we can seize a moment to accept the reality of the soil and the season that currently surrounds us long enough to allow resurrection to find its place in us. To do a new thing.