(Post by: Madie Hobbs)
Well, here we are again.
It feels to me as though I only just finished sitting down to write to all of you last New Year, and yet somehow, 2025 is already coming to a close.
The New Year terrifies me, I’ll be honest. I always come to the end of one year with a heavy heart, often full of regret, let down, and seemingly missed opportunities. I tend to start a new year with optimism, goals, and ambitions a little outlandish for real achievement. I think we all know how those things tend to go.
But this year, I don’t know which way to swing.
In a lot of ways, 2025 was one of the most difficult years of my life, with more letdown than I can count, more uncertainty that I knew what to do with, and more questions than I could ever begin to answer.
In other ways, it was a year of chasing new dreams. Of spending more time with people who never let me down, of using my voice to reach a wider audience of the internet, and of learning how to live a fractured life without letting it define my every decision.
What 2026 holds, I can only imagine (with a bit of fear and trembling).
My best friend and I sat down a couple of weeks ago to get a head start on our New Year’s plans, and I have to confess, part of me didn’t even want to set a standard for myself going into 2026. It’s easier for all of us to merely allow time to pass and do nothing, rather than let it pass and do nothing when we told ourselves we would do something.
But I’m determined for that to be different in 2026.
Too often, we take so little time to think of the responsibility we have to make something of ourselves, we neglect our greatest callings as Christians.
I’m not talking about some misplaced feeling of responsibility only to us. Some sense of needing to catch up to the standard of the people around you. I’m talking about the responsibility we have as Christians to live up to the standard God has for us.
This doesn’t always entail fitness goals and learning new skills like we so often like to focus on in a new year. This entails the charge we have been given to live our lives in such a way that every move we make, every word we say, and every person we interact with is irreparably changed by truth, goodness, and beauty.
We usually like to take a look around come a new year and examine everything that’s wrong with our lives, and the world around us. What if we did that this year and then actually decided to make a difference? What if we decided the lifestyles around us could no longer go unconfronted? What if we decided a certain kind of speech would no longer be welcome in our lives? What if we decided that every person we come in contact with is a soul worth saving, and their eternity is our responsibility?
I’m not going to pretend we haven’t heard this before. But I am going to assert that so few of us have acted on this message, the world around us feels no compulsion to change, and I will also state that this is a serious problem.
One you and I will answer for in Eternity.
As we go into 2026, I challenge you to examine what is actually on that list of goals you’re writing up today. Where are they focused? Only on you? Only on what someone else can do for you?
Let’s take a moment to step back and ask ourselves if those goals would align with what Jesus might choose for His New Year’s resolutions.
I’m not saying the fitness goals, or the work goals, or the academic goals you have aren’t important. They absolutely are, and my lists are littered with goals in those veins. What I am saying is you were built for more.
It’s time all of us started acting like that’s true.
The Few 
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