Our culture is obsessed with self-improvement. Every day—especially throughout the month of January—we are inundated with advertisements promising transformation: programs and products that claim to make us fitter, wealthier, more fulfilled, and more at peace. Everywhere we turn, we are told that we are not enough as we are—and that with enough effort, discipline, or the right purchase, we could finally become the person we’re meant to be.

There's a particular exhaustion that comes from living divided. Maybe you know it: the weariness of presenting one version of yourself at church, another at work, and yet another when you're alone scrolling through social media at midnight. It's the fatigue of always performing, always curating, always keeping certain rooms of your heart locked tight—even from God.

Paul writes something startling to the church at Colossae: "For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God." Past tense. Already accomplished. Not something you're working toward, but something that's already true about you. You've died. Your life is hidden. This is your reality.

Martha gets a bad reputation in today’s story, but I think we've misunderstood her. She wasn't doing something wrong by serving. She was doing something generous, hospitable, and good. The problem wasn't her activity. The problem was that her activity had become disconnected from her identity.

Moses wasn't looking for God that day. He was simply doing what he always did—tending his father-in-law's sheep on the far side of the wilderness. It was ordinary work, the kind that fills most of our days with routine and repetition. One foot in front of the other. One task after another. Nothing special.

There's a question most of us avoid asking ourselves: Am I living as one person, or am I living as several? We have our work self, our family self, our church self, our social media self. We speak differently depending on who's in the room. We believe one thing on Sunday and live another way on Monday. We've become experts at compartmentalization—splitting our lives into manageable sections that rarely speak to each other.

We often try to keep God at arm’s length. We attempt to bar Him from the messy, disordered places in our lives, quietly assuming there is a limit to how far His transformational love can reach. When we are overwhelmed with shame, we try to hide from His presence. Rather than running toward His loving embrace, we flee from Him, afraid He will reject or condemn us. Yet this fear is ungrounded. 

As you prepare to step into the year ahead, you carry with you everything you've learned about preparation, reception, participation, and reflection. These aren't just spiritual concepts to consider—they're practices to integrate into the rhythm of your daily life, creating a framework for how you'll navigate whatever the next twelve months bring.

As you step into the year ahead, one of the most valuable skills you can cultivate is the ability to reflect well—not just at the end of the year when you're looking back, but throughout the year as you're living it. Reflection is the practice of paying attention to what's happening in your life, noticing patterns, discerning God's movement, and allowing those observations to inform your next steps.

The year ahead isn't just something that will happen to you—it's something you get to participate in creating through your choices, your presence, your love, and your willingness to show up fully in the moments God places before you. Every day will present opportunities to engage with purpose, to bring your authentic self to relationships and responsibilities, to partner with God in His ongoing work of love and restoration in the world.

If this past year taught you anything, it probably taught you that life rarely unfolds exactly according to your plans. Doors opened that you never saw coming. Dreams shifted in unexpected directions. Challenges arose that weren't on your radar. And through it all, God was present, working, weaving together a story more complex and beautiful than anything you could have orchestrated yourself.

The year ahead stretches before you like an unwritten book, full of blank pages waiting to be filled. But before you grab your pen and start frantically planning every chapter, there's something beautiful about pausing in preparation—creating space for God's dreams to take root in your heart before your own plans crowd them out.

Every year is a story, and yours is coming to a close. Not with an abrupt ending or a frantic sprint to the finish line, but with the gentle turning of a page. It's time to honor the story that was—the chapters of joy and sorrow, growth and struggle, breakthrough and breakdown that have brought you to this moment.

Reflection is the practice of slowing down long enough to notice what's actually been happening in our lives, both on the surface and in the deeper places of our hearts. In our fast-paced world, we often move from one experience to the next without pausing to ask the deeper questions: What is God showing me? How am I changing? What patterns am I noticing? Where is love being expressed and received?

Participation is where the rubber meets the road in our spiritual lives. It's the bridge between what we receive from God and how we live that out in real time with real people in real circumstances. This isn't about religious duty or checking spiritual boxes—it's about the beautiful invitation to co-labor with God in His ongoing work of love, healing, and restoration in the world.

Reception is perhaps one of the most challenging spiritual disciplines for our modern hearts. We're conditioned to analyze, categorize, fix, or immediately respond to everything that comes our way. But God often works in mystery, in paradox, in ways that don't fit our neat theological boxes or our preferred timelines.

The year behind us likely held a mixture of joys and struggles, victories and disappointments, moments of clarity and seasons of confusion. Before we can properly reflect on where we've been or envision where we're going, we need to prepare our hearts to receive whatever God wants to show us.

When Jesus looked at fishermen mending their nets and said, "Come, follow me," He wasn't handing them a pamphlet or inviting them to attend a seminar. He wasn't offering a self-help program for a slightly improved life. He was extending an invitation into something far more radical and transformative: a complete reorientation of existence itself.

Today, we celebrate the ultimate expression of love—God giving His one and only Son. John 3:16-17  is so familiar that we can read right past them without feeling their weight. God so loved the world. Not just the religious people. Not just the good people. Not just the people who had it all together. God loved the world—the whole messy, broken, beautiful world—so much that He gave His most precious treasure.

John doesn't mess around. He gets straight to the heart of what love actually is—and it's not what we often think.We tend to measure love by feelings, by chemistry, by warm emotions that wash over us in meaningful moments. But John defines love differently. Love, he says, is God sending His Son into the world. Love is action. Love is sacrifice.