#thriveyear

The sun set on 2016 just as I crossed the drawbridge to the island we now live on. I pulled over, took a couple of pictures with my phone, and wept. You would think by now, after 45 years of living fully and nearly 23 years as a military wife, I would have grown accustomed to the rollercoaster ride of life’s high-highs and low-lows. But no…

That last sunset of 2016 brought tears because it brought closure to a year that left me spent. I know I’m not alone. I read your Facebook posts over the last several days, I’ve seen your almost-bitter memes all over social media. 2016 wrung us all out and left us thirsting for renewal and redemption.

Hebrews 11:1 Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.

hope

noun

a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.

“he looked through her belongings in the hope of coming across some information”

As 2015 drew to a close I knew the word I had to choose as the theme for 2016 would be “hope”. I needed hope. I longed for hope. Everywhere I turned the word kept popping up. So I chose it, or it chose me, and for 366 days we wrestled. The funny thing about hope is that even when it chooses you, you must accept it before it has the power to give you a “feeling of expectation”. For many of those 366 days I fought hard. For more than five years the majority of my expectations were met with disappointment. It is incredibly hard to be hope-full when you’ve been well-trained to be hopeless. As I watched the sun set on 2016 I wept because the fight is over and hope has won. I have faith that the things I still hope for will someday be.

In the last two weeks, as I resolved to let hope win, I had no clue what my word would be for 2017. And then it started showing up everywhere I looked. A tag on the side of a building in downtown Saint Petersburg… “Thrive”. A sign on a church near Tampa General Hospital… “Thrive”. Reading through the Psalms… “…my people will THRIVE…”, “…their children’s children will THRIVE…” and in Isaiah “They will THRIVE like watered grass…”.

And then, my Switchfoot loving daughter found this song on YouTube and played it repeatedly….

I’ll be honest. I have no clue what thriving will look like when I’ve spent such a very long time just surviving. My guess is that many of you are in the same boat. We’ve survived a hard year. Or two. Or five. But the hard is where the big, soul-cleansing, character-refining stuff happens. Me, you, us; we should be better versions of ourselves as we welcome this fresh, blank slate of a year. My best guess is this word that has chosen me isn’t just for me. In fact, I’m quite certain it isn’t. During the 366 days of wrestling with hope, I looked back through my journals and blog posts from the years leading up to these last few years of furnace dwelling and I remembered…

I thrive when I help others thrive. So, here’s your invitation…

Let’s thrive together. If you need encouragement, if you need inspiration, if you need brutal honesty, if you need hope… reach out. We’re all on this big messy, beautiful, soul-cleansing, character-refining road together. And, I have a child who requires 2-1 care around the clock. So I’m pretty much a shut-in. Seriously… message me or email me or call me if you have my number.

#thriveyear