It’s been over a year since I have posted anything on this blog. It hasn’t been a year since I have written; there are probably 5-10 unfinished potential posts laying around on my laptop or in a journal or a note on my phone. I have lots of incomplete thoughts or wonderings, without a whole lot of resolution, which resonates with this season of life in a way. In that year I have birthed a baby and watched him conquer a whole year of life. It should leave a person feeling pretty accomplished, and sometimes it does, but it also leaves me with lots of things not quite complete.

And here we are in a new year, with new hopes and bright outlooks. I try and make things perfect before I share them, and maybe that isn’t the right way to go about it. Sometimes you just have to start, just have to put it out there, in all the raw and imperfectness, to move towards something you’ll be proud of. “Nothing to it but to do it,” as my husband would say.

So here’s to 2024 – a year that I have definite, specific hopes for, but will surely surprise me along the way. I have chosen “yet” as my word for the year. I used it in regular conversation and was struck by it, like inspiration landing right on my shoulder.

I like how it assumes a posture of hopefulness and anticipation. It felt familiar during the season of Advent when we pondered the coming celebration of the birth of Jesus, and the heaviness the world must have felt while they waited for their coming King. It is similar to the way we often feel as we wait for Jesus to return. We live steeped in a “yet” kind of way, as nothing is ever really as complete and whole as we’d like it to be. 

Maybe you can name the “yet” in your life. It is a reframing of the way we might see our lives as incomplete, lacking, or even empty. Maybe it is just that we have yet to discover what is next. We have yet to meet a person who will change our lives, or make a move that will open the right doors, or learn a lesson that will help us have clarity. Ultimately we live in a yet kind of way, because this world is not our home and it just isn’t all there is. When we are so focused on this life and this world we can get lost in all the not yets. We can feel like something is owed to us.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time I have been drawn to that word. I wrote about it at a time when I was deeply heartbroken, after experiencing a pregnancy loss that practically destroyed me and my faith in God. I clung to these verses as my lifeline:

“Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.”

HABAKKUK 3:17-18

“This hasn’t happened…yet.” Viewing life this way helps me have hope and look forward to the good that might be coming.

I want to relax into the trust that I have in God’s plans. Habakkuk gives us the framework for this: “Though…yet.” Though might be the reality, but yet is our hope. We of course are not promised that our desires in life will most definitely come. Certainly many of us will live our lives with unmet desires and hopes.

In that season I was so consumed with the “though…” reality of my life, the not yet I was experiencing, I could only just barely recognize the hope in the word itself. 

So yes, now I have a beautiful baby boy and that “yet” I was waiting for is a reality, but I still experience the longing and the questioning the same way. I still have parts of life that aren’t exactly how I’d like them to be, I have questions about what will happen in the future. I have hopes that are not yet realized. I can’t imagine there are very many, if any, people in the world that don’t have some category of “yet” that they are still waiting on. 

My parents have a tree in their backyard that needs severe pruning over the winter. My son loves going outside and touching the leaves on each tree, sometimes pulling them off and waving them around. When I took him outside recently and he saw the tree with no leaves on it, he was very confused. I told him, “sometimes things have to be cut back so new life can grow.” I felt like God spoke those same words to me in that moment. Pruning is painful, but it is also purposeful.

If I am honest, there are some categories in my life that feel like they are dead or dying right now. In my pessimism, it can feel like hopes are forever gone and things won’t make sense. This word, this concept of yet, provides me a ladder out of the hole these thoughts push me into. 

We cannot take the hard things and wrap them up in a pretty bow; we cannot control or white knuckle circumstances into changing. We cannot know what the future will hold. But we can live into the yet to which God invites us. We can walk with curiosity about what He might have in store for us. We can release our fears and attempts to manage the details of our lives, knowing that God is the Creator of time, and so He is so much better at being in charge than we are.

Here is to a year of hope, to a year of not stopping at “this hasn’t happened…” or “I’ll never…” but instead continuing on to the yet that draws us into God’s heart for us and plans for our lives.

And here is to a year of sharing more thoughts and realizations – however incomplete or imperfect.