2025: Healing
A Word for the Year
While I am someone who does New Year’s Resolutions, I have never been one of those people who have selected a word for the year. I guess I never saw the point — why select one word on the first day of the year to define all the other days which will be so unique, unpredictable, and everchanging?
This year, however, I think I understand the point; it’s not so much to define what the rest of the year will be but to walk forward looking for opportunities to indulge and engage in the word that is selected. Just like the phenomenon where you think a number is being projected into your life — but in all reality, it’s just called to your attention the existence of the number around you— so your focus must change on chasing the word selected. If you are searching for joy, you are bound to have more joy. If you are searching for gratitude, you are going to find avenues to be more grateful.
As I’ve thought about my goals and all that I’d like to do with my life in the coming year, I have felt the Lord place on my heart the word healing.
And, after the year of 2024, I believe healing is the natural progression of my walk forward — both in my stature (or the shrinking of it now that I am past the age of 30) and my faith.
The Jesus Year
I have a long-running joke (at least to myself) that oft annoys the people in my life; the year that I know someone is turning 33, I like to remind them it’s their “Jesus Year.” In part because they’ll come to find out if it’s the Lord’s will to live longer on the earth than our Savior did, but also because the culmination of Jesus’ ministry came the year He turned 33. We often think our 30s are the beginning of the end (which, I suppose, one could argue that it was Jesus’ if they do not walk in faith), but our biblical forefathers and foremothers bear witness that youth is rarely the pinnacle of all that God is doing in us and through us.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve missed so much of life in my 20s. I had neither the means to travel, my husband did not arrive until the decade’s end, and I spent so much of my time working multiple jobs just to keep myself afloat. There was no life and vibrancy; I feel like my 20s were just a series of wasted years in which I stayed in a relationship with my narcissistic mother past the age of adolescence — when I should have gotten out — and allowed myself to just continue the spiral of damage. I saw my body go through so much suffering as I tried to chase a standard of beauty held up by both the world and the church, only to find out how badly wounded my body was from all of the stress I was holding onto and how much I was never going to have a “normal” existence that others had.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to invest in steps that would lead me to uncover what was going on behind the scenes in my life: spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Through the support and help of functional medicine, counseling, therapy, boundaries, birthing a baby, and having to navigate back to a sense of self postpartum, I learned just how broken everything was beneath the surface. And much like Luisa in the titular song I was exhausted under the surface pressure but didn’t know how to get out from underneath the weight. Slowly, those around me helped me lift the heavy burden and crawl to a sense of safety.
So here I am, weak in the knees and unsteady without the pain of things pressing into my back. Yet, I must still walk forward.
And this is where healing takes place. This is the foundation of where I think God is calling me to use gifting and talents He has granted me. But it is up to me to steward what He has passed down.
Buckling and Bending Until Breaking
I have struggled with mental illness for a long time. Whether it be seasons of depression or anxiety, I have ridden the boat of not quite being okay for decades (my guess - I probably should have had professional help since middle school). But I never had the privilege of just being able to stop and lay in bed for days. I had a moment in one particularly dark season of depression in my second year of college of turning down an extra shift at the local coffee joint I worked at to lie in bed and sleep, but I was chewed out so viciously by my mother that I never turned down a shift or even called in sick, again. I had realized I didn’t have the option to break.
With nothing left in my reserves, I continued to push forward. I’ve had seasons of my life where I would wake at 6 am to head to work at a school, work until after 3, and have a 45-minute break where I would then drive to my next job to work until 11 or 12 pm over the holidays. I would do this for days on end, with perhaps one day off to get my affairs in order for the week. It was exhausting, I was exhausted, but I was trying to pay the bills — insurance, rent for the room in my parent’s house, saving up to go back to school so I could hopefully get a job that would hire me for more than minimum wage at below 40 hours a week. I was so incredibly lonely in many of these years, but I had to keep going; there was no other option.
Even when the pandemic hit, I didn’t have time to slow down. I was trying to figure out a wedding that may or may not take place, navigating life as a newlywed with no support system outside of the two of us, and then trying to get a job teaching as the pandemic still raged in New York. I endured several heartbreaks during this time, things that have brought other women to their knees. I had no family to fall back on and a scant number of friends — I had to keep going. Even with my Hashimoto’s diagnosis, I had to press on.
I was sometimes dragging myself along; I’ve had days of weeping at work between classes and then pulling myself together to impart information on tweens and teens who were struggling just as much as I was. I kept telling myself I wouldn’t break.
And then we had my daughter in 2023. It was an incredibly redemptive birth that opened my eyes to the “man behind the curtain” of trauma and PTSD, but it also ushered in one of the toughest seasons of my life.
My baby blues quickly turned into postpartum anxiety; things were not going the way I had planned them to when I had my baby, and the loss of control, when I was feeling so foreign in my body, was too much for me to handle. I could no longer bend and buckle; I was breaking. I had reached my end. Confined to my house, grasping for some sense of control as I barked at my husband how to hold my baby (because I thought she was suffering and oh, so alone — thanks mommy blogs), and so utterly terrified that my daughter hated me because I was failing as a mother, as my mother before had so utterly failed me, I was broken. Sleep was hard. Eating was hard. It was actually one of the times in my life I lost a good deal of weight because I was constantly worried. After a particularly hard fight with my husband over my controlling behavior, I knew I couldn’t do this anymore.
The first step toward healing wasn’t a specific prayer or a Road to Damascus moment. While those are certainly important in our lives with God, it isn’t always how He provides restoration this side of heaven.
My first step toward healing was accepting the help of a little tiny blue pill known commonly as Zoloft. I began anti-anxiety medication. After a few weeks, I felt my brain calm down and my ears open once more to be able to listen to God. I had reached my breaking point, and in that, I had to let my guard down and ask for help. Accept that I had come to my end and I could go forward no longer.
Kintsugi
Some people know of the Japanese practice called kintsugi. It is the practice of taking broken pottery and piecing it back together with gold. The piece has been elevated and takes on a beautiful new texture and coloring, but despite its beauty, the cracks are still visible.
Part of what I had to accept in 2024 is that my life was never going to be crack-free. I was never going to be able to smooth out the edges that had been splintered and separated long before I was even in control of my own life. No amount of therapy was going to take away the sadness I feel for the little girl abandoned and manipulated and controlled and abused growing up. But I could look at those cracks and see the beauty that could come from being able to accept it needed to be fixed and glued together.
And I could turn at this point and be angry for all the things that happened to me. All the hurt and pain I had been trying for so long to get away from, to appease enough to make it stop. I could be angry that God allowed all of this to happen.
Or I can accept that I am in a fallen world. I believe strongly in the concept of free will, so I can acknowledge that people have chosen not to seek the blessings and forgiveness of God. Part of that consequence spills over into other relationships and community, because God did not design us for a vacuum. But He also did not make it so we would suffer without joy forever. Instead, He asks us to give all of that hurt and brokenness to Him.
He promises, in the often wrongly quoted verse, that “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28, CSB, emphasis my own). God does not work together things for good for those who do not seek Him, who do not love Him, who do not lay down the shattered pieces before His throne. Can those people reap some of the blessings that rain down on God’s people? Sure. But God’s primary pipeline of blessing are those who love God. Those called according to His purpose. This isn’t meant to be a Calvinistic pre-destination, no choice position — it’s meant to say you need to cooperate with God to be called to His purpose. He isn’t going to force you to accept His grace and goodness. He is simply going to offer it. It is when we accept that we need Him that He can begin to work the hurt into healing. The beauty into ashes.
He’s been doing it since the beginning of creation, when Adam and Eve walked away and insisted on doing it on their own. When they confessed to Him in the garden and tried to return to community, God set into the motion the plan He had formed to work all this death and destruction and disunity into life, reclamation, and harmony.
This is where I have to surrender the pieces and place them in the potter’s hand. This is where I have to say, “God, I cannot make these better on my own.” I’m ashamed to say that I have tried. But like a child trying to lick back together a shattered vase, the vessel will not come together in my own strength.
This is my kintsugi year. The year where I am going to cease brushing all the broken parts of me under the rug, ashamed to admit that I need help and hope and healing. I am no longer going to pretend that I have it all together. This is the year I am walking boldly to the cross, the same cross carried by a man who was the age I am turning later this year, and I will ask Him to put together those pieces with His precious blood.
Some of this healing could be miraculous; I could wake up one day and no longer question myself or my reality while trying to navigate healing from the betrayal of those close to me in vulnerable and personal areas in my life, or it could just be months of doing the work to find that trust in God and in myself. I doubt my Hashimoto’s is going to be miraculously healed, but I know it’s not impossible. Most likely, I am going to need to take the reins and really dedicate this year to eating the way I need to, no matter how inconvenient or exhausting, and finding ways to move my body that nourish and support it.
While some of what I must walk through is hard — the cross I must bear, as the biblical story would attest — just because it is hard, does not mean it is bad. If anything, I know that, much like after a long day of physically working or volunteering, there will be relief in the exhaustion. The healing will come in spite of the effort.
I look forward to where I am going to be in 2026. I think there are going to be blessings I see off on the horizon, like a rainstorm across the plains, that will drench my life later this year. But until that torrent comes, I must be patient and I must prepare.
In doing this, I am going to look for the ways in which I can heal myself. Physically, emotionally, mentally…and, yes, spiritually.
I want to bring you on this journey of where I have been and where I am going. Some of this healing will come through the cathartic act of storytelling, of laying out the remembrance stones of where God has brought me from. And I look forward to looking back on this blog post in January 2026, when God will have set another word on my heart, and see all the ways in which He answers this breath prayer of, Jehovah Rapha, come and heal.
