Feast & Famine: A Wish For The New Year

Before Christmas, an enthusiastic colleague of mine caught me up in conversation at a holiday gathering.  As we discussed the year to come, she announced, “I came up with my word for the year!”

In my professional and personal circles, choosing a “word” for the new year is a pretty common practice.  Some people practice it as a sort of New-Age inspired “manifest your will” magic, choosing a word they believe they—or the Universe, or Energy, or a Toaster, or whatever—will bring into being in the coming year.  Others—me included, and even on this blog—choose a word as a sort of thematic focus: a place or a way we hope to focus our attention. 

She told me eagerly all about her word and what it would be and asked me had I picked mine for the coming year.  I demurred.  She paused, surprised.  “Well did you have a word for this past year?” she asked.  “It helps if you do.”

“I did,” I told her.

“What was it?”

I thought of the word written out in careful calligraphy in my journal on January 2023, underlined three times and with an eight-paragraph sortie beneath.  “Nourishment.”

At the time, I had just returned home from my first Christmas without my mom, who had died only a little over a month prior.  I was broken and exhausted and overwhelmed.  I chose my word in hopes that I could plan for, perhaps prioritize, a year of getting myself back to right: gentle caretaking, little stress, small pleasures.

She beamed.  “Oh, that’s a good word. So what word would you use to describe the past year?” And bless her, she had an expectant twinkle in her eyes.  She was anticipating a word like abundance or plenitude or satisfied.

“Starvation,” I said, dryly.

The shocked look on her face told me I ought to make a joke out of it, and so I did.  I’m sure she lost that fragment of conversation among a thousand others from that night.  But I’ve thought on it since, the truth in what I told her, the difference between my expectation for the year past and the reality of it.

That’s not to say it was a bad year.  Much of it was quite good.  I loved and was loved; I experienced many wonderful things; I learned and I grew.  But I have never limped into the end of the year feeling more like a husk, spiritually and physically, disintegrating at some cellular level. 

A fair amount of it was my own fault, and I can own that in retrospect, though I don’t think I realized it at the time.  I chose to push myself professionally harder than I should have.  I gave my anxiety too many footholds, indulged my own fears, refused to set boundaries against people and problems I knew would be stressors. 

But much of what devastated me slowly and over time was the simple emergence of what I can only call, with a wave of the hand, unexpected life stuff.  The myriad difficulties and challenges that come from being the only child of a widower who now has nowhere else to look for comfort, help, or assurance.  The emergence of politics at work that rocked my schedule, my projects, and my plans every two days.  The entrance into my professional and personal life of some genuinely nasty people out to harm and hurt.  The fickleness of friendships.  Changes to my schedule.

Resultantly, I’ve not given to God as much as I wanted this year.  I’ve not grown as close to God as I wanted this year.  In January 2023 I imagined myself a year hence as being wiser, stronger, somehow serene and more saintly: made wise but gentler through sorrow, more loving, more peaceful.  Instead I’ve lurched onto the shores of the New Year like a keelhauled shipwreck, fresh from a bout of food poisoning, wild-eyed and worn out.

I comfort myself that God loves me the same, regardless.

That is the comfort, really.  It’s nothing short of a marvel.  For as much as I like to pretend my behavior can and can’t determine the tides and time of my life and where it goes, when the charade disintegrates I can at least be relieved that certain particulars will not change.  I am grateful for that.  Eternally grateful for that.

And, you know I also think that at times it has to happen this way.

Not that it needed to happen this way.  As I confessed, much of what became of me this year I could possibly have sidestepped, had I been wiser or listened better to the counsel of those who loved me.  But God is wise, and God lets us go where we will, and God sets the seasons of our lives as much as of the earth.  And God knows sometimes we need to learn from living rather than listening, and so here I am.

I’ll tell you: I refuse to pick a word for the coming year.

I have no idea what will happen to me or to anyone else.  Too much has gone on this year for me to have the slightest shred of naivete about what I can predict, plan, or project for the future.  I know what I’d like to have happen.  I always set goals.  I’m a dreamer by nature.  But ask me to describe what I hope the coming future will be?

After this year, I wouldn’t dream of it.

But I will tell you something else, too.  We are only ever as strong as what can pull us from the riptide.  And looking back over this starvation year, I can say that I didn’t wither away into nothing because of love.  Because God loved me.  Because there was always, always provision, something solid to clutch at in the pitching seas, that inevitable force moving me forward. 

I think to myself that, for the new year, I can choose to bind myself tightly to the mast.  I can’t predict what will happen but I do know what God wants, always permits, and always blesses, and I know begging for more is never asking for too much if it’s for the presence of His spirit and immersion in His presence and deeper wells of faith and hope and love. 

I think, because I don’t know what’s coming, this is the path of wisdom.  Good or ill, feast or famine, asking God for more of God, or to the extent that I can committing myself to a deeper dive in the Spirit, in being locked-down and anchored where I need to be, will matter more than anything else I could predict or plan.

And I wouldn’t have felt the desperation to do so without this year.  So this spiritual and emotional starvation, in some ways, is made gift from curse in the hands of a redeeming God.

Whatever your year brings, I pray God blesses you with preparedness for it in the Spirit and an abundance of love.  I pray you’re strengthened in your faith where you are weak and that you are not tested or tempted severely.  And I pray you peace—regardless of the storms within and without, even inside of them, always, inside and through.