Three Life Themes I Followed In 2024

2025 is here! I’ve been reflecting on the past year as I try to decide what choices I want to make in the coming year. Fortunately, 2024 was a year of tremendous growth for me, and I want to pass on some of the core ideas and themes that guided me through it, which will also inform my actions and choices this coming year.

God Comes First

This should seem obvious for me as a Christian, but it has become easier than ever in this world for people who claim to follow Jesus to actually put their own interests and idols before God, often without realizing it. I have frequently been guilty of letting my pride and selfishness hinder my journey towards intimacy with my Heavenly Father.

I entered 2024 with a word for the year, joining in a tradition that several of my friends and ministry colleagues practice. That word was Love. I wanted to learn what it means to love God more fully, because then I could better love others by extension. Interestingly, as a result, God turned my focus to the topic of fear, with this verse going along for the ride: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” (1 John 4:18).

I began to realize just how much fear ruled my life. Anxiety was practically a daily struggle. In most cases, that anxiety was fear of things I couldn’t control or uncertainty about what the future may hold. It became paralyzing: I suffered from laziness born of perfectionism and a lack of motivation to do the very things I claimed to love, including writing and reading. Also, I began to realize I feared God’s will for my life for some reason and I didn’t trust Him fully. It was as if I secretly believed, deep down, that God was holding out on me or didn’t care about my feelings and desires.

So I decided to pray for increased faith and trust and decreased doubt and fear. At the same time, I began to focus on what it means to have an intimate relationship with Jesus, the one thing He desires most from us. The Holy Spirit led me on quite a journey through faith, hope, and love in 2024 as a result, the deeper effects of which I’m only just beginning to see. It’s crazy how much I find myself capable of doing and accomplishing when I focus on keeping the love of God at the forefront of every thought and deed.

I’m going to keep focusing on the concept of Love this year—God’s holy and perfect agape love, to be precise (our Western cultural context necessitates an accurate definition of love these days)—and continue to investigate what it means to put God first and abide in His presence. I get the feeling I’ve only just scratched the surface, and I’m eager to see what’s underneath the things I’ve recently discovered.

Integrity Is Essential

In 2024, I was reminded of how important integrity is. Genuine, well-maintained integrity is becoming harder to find in our world. Everywhere you turn today, a significant leader, “influencer”, or public servant—be they secular or religious, liberal or conservative—is getting bad press for, to put it politely, poor decision-making or doing things just for attention and money. To make matters worse, for a myriad of complex reasons, people often defend horrible mistakes that come from a lack of integrity rather than holding such people (or even themselves) accountable for their actions.

The wild part about that is there are plenty of people with integrity in the world, they just don’t make headlines because they live boots-on-the-ground and under the radar of “gotcha journalism” and social media mobs. Many people have stopped trusting our world’s political, thought, and religious leaders all along the spectrum of belief systems because of frequent scandals, the weaponization of power, and an abundance of lies and deception, the full extent of which we may never know. Power begets pride, which frequently corrupts integrity, and self-control is a rare and valuable personality trait.

The Lord impressed on me in 2024 and going into 2025 the importance of living above reproach—to be an open book, with no façade, with proper boundaries in place, and with the Holy Spirit controlling the words that come out of my mouth and fingers. This requires raw honesty and admitting to potentially embarrassing mistakes.

Integrity is not flawless perfection, but rather living as steadfastly as possible in grace and truth and right standing with God. It includes confessing weakness and asking for help with bearing burdens. Integrity also requires accepting consequences, both positive and negative. It means engaging in meaningful accountability, possessing a willingness to face spiritual warfare head-on, and heavily relying on Scripture as a guide. I want all of those things to be a part of who I am, that God may be glorified.

Anything is possible with God, right?

Pray the Impossible Prayers

Speaking of possibilities…

My God is a God of the impossible. He showed me that a lot in 2024. In recent years, I’ve had the privilege of watching people heal from years and decades of addiction, open up about past and current struggles, and delicately work on sewing ripped-apart relationships back together. I’ve lifted some of my own personal struggles to the Lord in desperation for the ability to change, and watched as He began to deliver me from self-righteousness, perfectionism, and bad habits.

I felt Him pushing me to pray for things that seemed impossible or were completely out of my control. After all, He reminded me, what did I have to lose by praying those prayers, since part of me was already prepared for them to go unanswered or answered in a way I wouldn’t like? I believe my Father delights in answering prayers that cause us to draw nearer to Him and that show off just how much beauty He can make out of a dumpster fire. He delights in giving strength in our weakness. He delights in uplifting those who truly humble themselves before Him.

I asked Him continually to chop down my pride like a lumberjack, because I had self-worship strongholds that I didn’t even realize existed (and I still do, though the Lord has definitely done some great work in helping me confront my selfishness and idolatry). And though it was often painful for me, He took an axe to those trees and continues to do so. It was and is well worth the work.

What’s Next?

The future continues to be just ahead, waiting to arrive. But I frequently remind myself we are not promised tomorrow. We live in the Now, with the past as our only context for what the future could hold, and the future a dream and a hope of what could be. What’s next is choosing to make small, meaningful, good decisions today and watching over the course of the next year as they add up to a harvest of righteousness.

The one thing I know for sure is that God’s Kingdom is coming in this world, pushing aside darkness. Evil exists, but so does His goodness, and He loves using us as vessels of His goodness to bring healing and wholeness to our broken world. It is my prayer that He uses my life in this way in 2025.