PLANTING HOPE

At the end of this year, I find myself standing in a bare field, winter-quiet, where nothing yet grows and everything waits. I have been carried here, to wind and water, to a land not my own, by choices made in scarcity and trust, by the strange grace of being stripped yet still sustained. I let go of names I once owned, ‘teacher’ and ‘pastor’, and laid them down like old tools at the edge of the soil. I do not know what will rise from this ground, but I kneel before it, not in defeat, but in a kind of listening.

I remember the words that find me again now: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:3–6). I hear them not as promises of escape, but as a quiet naming of where I am: empty, grieving, longing, yet not abandoned. In this naming, I sense a blessing that does not deny the wound but passes through it like light through thin glass.

So I plant hope here, not as certainty, but as fidelity: a small act of trust in a future I cannot yet see. I entrust what has been lost, and what is still unformed, into the hands that have already held me through this unchosen journey. I walk on with little more than this faith, that every faithful path, however unjust or unclear its beginning, is being gathered into a larger peace than I can envision, and that even here, in letting go, I am not falling but being led.

I turn now and offer a quiet farewell to 2025, a year that asked more than I thought I could give and gave more than I knew how to receive. I welcome 2026 not with triumph, but with open hands, trusting that the same grace that carried me through loss will also teach me how to receive what is new. Between goodbye and welcome, I remain here for a moment, grateful, trembling, and ready, as time itself becomes a threshold, and I step across it in peace.

Voorburg, 31 December 2025

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