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As a new year begins, my social media timeline is flooded with everyone’s end-of-the-year posts.
While doomscrolling, I’m met with endless vacations, accomplishments, and celebrations of the year 2025.
Typically, I too take part in sharing my highlight reel, but not this year—I don’t have one.
2025 was a year of hardship—trials of various kinds.
What I do have, as I sit here on the first day of 2026 and reflect, is confidence that no matter the trial, my eyes and heart remained fixed on Jesus.
That’s the goal, isn’t it?
To “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith . . .”
Weight can look like burdens, trials, and emotional heaviness.
It can also look like promotions, success, and each of the aforementioned highlight-reel components.
Anything that tempts us to take our eyes off of Jesus is a weight—weight we are commanded to lay aside in order to fix our eyes and run toward Him.
Laying aside does not mean that, in a trial, we are to live in delusion or denial, acting as if it and/or the emotions it produces do not exist.
Laying aside also does not mean we rid ourselves of, or do not accept, the blessings God gives us.
Laying aside does mean that neither the burden nor the blessing is the main thing.
We are not to be defined or controlled by either.
The substance has and will always belong to Christ, no matter our circumstance.
Our sin also brings weight—weight of earthly consequence and, worse, the weight of distance in our relationship with Christ.
As David did, we too must ask God to search, try, and reveal any sinful way in us so that we may cut it off and be led in the way everlasting.
He alone is where hope is found.
Romans 15:13 says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
Jesus came to give peace and joy—not as the world gives (when circumstances such as the start of a new year create feelings of calm and happiness)—but as He gives through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
It is by the power of the Holy Spirit living in us that we may abound in hope.
No matter our circumstance, we can have abundant hope in who God is and in what His Word says.
What God has said He will do, His Word will never return void.
No matter our sin, we can hope in the power of the Holy Spirit—a power that convicts and helps continually change us into the image of Christ.
This is the hope I am grateful sustained me in 2025, and it is the hope I am thankful to carry with me into 2026 and beyond.
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