I heard my daughter in another room banging her hands on her keyboard. She was practicing for her recital the next day and growing frustrated when her fingers didn’t properly dance across the keys to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”np

The cacophony ceased, and I walked in to find her crying into her hands. I took her in my arms and asked, “What’s wrong, baby girl?” 

“I can’t get it right,” she sobbed. “I need to play it perfectly!”

I wonder where she gets that from, I thought. I remembered the same perfectionist anxiety I carried as a little girl—singing a solo at church, taking a test, or playing in my own piano recitals. I held her tenderly in my arms, empathizing with the familiar weight of perfectionism.

Anxiety rose as the plane lifted off, and I did what I always do when I feel overwhelmed: I started making a list. I wrote down all the ways I would jump back into everything once I got home.

However, halfway through drafting a habit tracker, the Lord gently reminded me: my relationship with him isn’t another checklist to conquer or appointment to squeeze into my schedule. In a season that already feels out of control, Jesus invites me to abide—to rest in him through small, simple rhythms that bring calm to the rest of my life.

Jesus does not ask us to try to fit him into the margins of our already overloaded days. Instead, he invites us to let him restructure our days around the cross so that he can bear the weight for us.

“Everything is so green!” I exclaim as the wind whips through my hair and the pontoon boat skims across the water. The scenery is so vibrant, it looks like something out of a cartoon.

“Yeah, it’s wild how different everything looks when we’re not in a drought,” my friend says.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I pause, letting her words settle in.

I remember the dry, brown days last summer, and the summer before, and pretty much every summer since we moved to this area. We’ve had several years of official droughts, and even when we weren’t officially in a drought season, the landscape was always a faded green at best.

Noise often chases away any silence in our hearts, our heads, and our homes during this season. As one year ends and another begins, loud voices shout out what we should be doing, buying, and thinking. On December 26, sales on toys will be replaced with advertisements for planners. Baking supplies for nutritional supplements. Twinkling lights for yoga mats.

An avid goal setter myself, I usually love this time of year to reflect and reset. To take the good of the past twelve months and plan to make it even better in the next. I typically select a word for the year and base all my goals on that central intention. Since Thanksgiving, I have been considering what word I would choose for 2025.

You know those regrets that won’t release their talons from your brain. They set in their claws so deeply that, if you try to remove them, you feel like you’ll end up removing part of yourself.

I have one such memory. One that as soon it gets pushed to the recesses of my mind, my long-term memory digs it up to broadcast at 11:27 p.m.—replaying it over and over so I finally fall back asleep curled up in shame.

You don’t have to wonder; I will tell you the story. Before I begin, though, I must let you know that I’m well aware that this is not that bad. You will be tempted to read my anecdote below, scoff, then say, “Seriously, get over it!” But for some reason I can’t, no matter how many times I try to expunge it from my mental record. No matter how often my husband confirms that it was, indeed, not a big deal, I still get squeamish any time I drive near the part of town where it occurred. We all have those moments (big or small) of shame, failure, or embarrassment that we can’t remove from our brain or our identity.

Without further ado, here we go: