2019: Blessing the Year I Wanted to Forget

I don’t know what your 2019 was like. Perhaps it was the best year ever. Maybe not. Whatever it held for you, please know this: the tensions and irreconcilable juxtapositions have purpose. Sometimes we receive glimpses of their gifts, but even if you never see their goodnesses this side of eternity, they do exist. Here’s something else: We have power to create life with our words—for our memories, and thus, for our present and future. So that’s what I’m doing here. I call out the blessedness from the past 12 months. It cannot hide. God will not let it, and neither with I. Here’s my torch to a heck of a year.

Dear 2019,

You were the year I wanted to write off. Forget you ever happened.

I’ll take a picket fence or an easy button instead. Bring the change, escape, something different. Anything but you.

You were ongoing trauma.

A year of waiting rooms and recoveries. Care-giving and legalities. Emotions, turmoil, and asking for help. You nearly wrecked me to bits with blows and burial. I floated in a fog of overwhelming disbelief. I sat in numbness.

To cope, I wrapped myself in blankets of psalms and sweated with a fever of what felt like every feeling all at once for months. I drove to a lake in the early mornings to sit in silence. I wanted to hear nothing or anything.

You were hard. Unbelievable, inconceivable, unutterable circumstances. Even now, my body remembers, wants to protect, deflect, and tenses, “Don’t go there again.” I want to blot you out, but I can’t.

You have something for me. I can smell it.

That sounds funny to say, yet it’s like pine and ash on a startling frigid midwinter day. My shoulders tense as I walk. There’s snow and I’ve been plodding along for a while and I’ve barely noticed how setting light stretches its blue shadowy arm long before me and beckons. I relax a little.

The poet Jane Kenyon writes, “The soul’s bliss and suffering are bound together.”

Can this pain simultaneously hold blessing?

You stand before me, a white-tipped spruce, planted firm, rousing me to remember. I will recount the good. I must. Yes, even darkness, in its extravagance, crowds around the light.

Photo by Unsplash

2019, you made me a doubter and a believer. You made me sit down and shut up. You forced me to listen. To people. God. Myself.

You stripped me of independence and gave me heldness.

You rooted out pride and handed me a mustard seed of trust.

You whispered worthiness through humility, rescue through reliance.

You quieted my heart.

You taught me to endure.

I call you good because you gave me that too.

Long stretches of solitude. Retreats. Rescues. Birthdays. Breaths. Holy days. Hidden poetry. Coffees with friends. Long walks and bold foxes crossing late night paths. Talks. Runs. Worship. A week of uninterrupted writing. Colorado sunsets. Snuggles. Thoughtful hours and piles of good books with thoughts to seep into my soul and change me.

There’s more, of course.

Learning to listen, lives saved, weight lifed, voices expressed. A coyote on a frozen lake and wings built right under where I sleep.

Yes, more, but I have not the room or the time to type them here.

2019, your light startles me. You stare through the tree straight to the quick of my core. You dare me to bless you.

Tell me first: what is it like to be pure mystery? What is it like to not even know what God is going to do with you? Do you have an inkling? Yes, I ask a lot of questions. You were, as they say, bru-tiful. You were hard and you were lovely. Not so unlike me.

We are instruments of beauty so starred and shining best when we conform to the will of the One who made us, indwells us, and redeems our being.

That is what this is: a reshaping of imagination. What I think about you determines how you and I will live from this day on.

Oh, what a fight I put up! I’m sure there will be days I struggle to see your good, to forgive us both again. So I let go. I trust your teaching. I bow in humble hope.

Before I go, may I bless you?

2019, I breathe on you well wishes and wholeness into our shared memories.

Thank you for the hardship. Thank you for the joy wonder. Thank you for peace which only comes through wilderness.

I call you by name. Blessed year. Teaching, befriending, undoing, remaking. Thank you for all of it: what is seen, unseen, and someday-to-be-grasped.