When a year’s end doesn’t bring the promised improvement.

As a year comes to the close I typically have my eyes set forward on a fresh start —what will the new year hold? What will I learn?

But as this past year drew to the end I found myself more often looking back.

Looking at what I had become.

And what do you do when you come to the end of the year and feel that in your becoming you became something you weren’t planning for —someone you didn’t set out to be?

I realized that with the many challenges we faced in the year that was ending along with the new world of becoming a mother to three, I had ended the year with fists clenched tighter than perhaps they’d ever been.

I had walked through seasons of surrender over and over again, and yet it seemed that within the span of just one year, nearly all of that work had been undone.

I didn’t want any plan but my own to unfold.
I didn’t want what someone else thought was best.

In the world of foster care you are daily at the mercy of what others think is best.

I had begun the practice of clenching tightly to the only way forward that I felt I was able to handle.

I grasped tighter and tighter as the year unfolded, to the fragments of control I thought I had, daily growing more afraid that my life could spin out of my false reality of control at any moment.

And truthfully, it could.

But the control I grasped at was only an illusion to begin with, and as the year came to its end I didn’t have to be convinced.

This was a practice I needed to leave behind.

What I felt was giving me control was really the very thing robbing me of all my peace and joy.

In the world I’m in and the nature of our family I daily must accept that what most parents can, or perhaps feel deeply that they have control of, I am daily reminded that I do not.

There is a greater reality of trusting our kiddos to the Lord than what I ever expected to face.

But perhaps what brought me to my small awakening was the day we thought most certainly we would loose our little 12 week baby.

This was the reminder I needed that all of my kiddos, whether or not they are biological, must be entrusted to the One who is truly in control of every detail.

And as I step into these beginning days of 2024 it is with this theme in my heart.

I am His.
My family is His.

And He is very good at being God.

I am not.

And any time I fall for the bait to try and overtake what He is orchestrating I must be reminded of this.

“Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.”

He is enough to hold us.
He is enough to hold my questions + fears.
Peace is found when I surrender.

He knows the coming days and His grace will meet me each morning as I rise to face them.

And if, like me, you have come to the end of the year less than pleased with who you’ve become - realizing only that you have not improved after all, in at least one way or another.

Here is the fresh reminder - we don’t have to start back at the beginning. We only need to turn back to what is true.

We only need to ask, and help He will always bring.