As we went off for our night away from the kids at a nearby abbey – a personal Advent retreat we got to take together (the best Christmas present ever from my in-laws) – a friend suggested something about finding my word for the new year. There are fun word generators you can find online, that’s what she meant, but I wasn’t really planning to do that. Then, on the retreat, I flipped through the monks’ newsletter and found an article on the Year of Jubilee 2025. I hadn’t known anything about this, could not have told you that the theme for the year is hope. The monk quoted Pope Francis’s introductory words about the Jubilee, and I felt sure I had found my word without even looking for it. He spoke about Mary as the model for hope and said, “In the Blessed Virgin, we see that hope is not naive optimism but a gift of grace amid the realities of life.”
Our family is facing a year of potential transition, big time. The reality of the situation is legit cause for anxiety. There’s unknowns, there’s loss of many good things, without knowing yet if or what good will come of the changes. But for now, we are still in a period of waiting. Waiting, and hoping, that God will make clear the path forward, and that it will be a good one for our family. Hoping for His guidance and providence. I feel most hopeful, and at peace, when I remember what He has already done for us. How we moved to South Bend and then again to the DC area not knowing anyone, and almost instantly made great friends and found community and eventually great schools for our kids. So, I’m starting off this year still in a posture of waiting, but asking for the gift of that grace of hope.
A side note is that this is the first January in ten years that I haven’t had a nursing infant or been pregnant, though this long long period of waiting feels similar in some ways to the wait of a pregnancy, and the relief I will feel when the waiting is finally over will be somewhat analogous to birth. My hope is that God will be birthing something new and good in our family – something we can’t even fully conceive – and that we will be open to receiving it.
Glimpses of Joy 