2025: the Year of...

“Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.”           ~Psalm 27:14

​I’ve gotten into the practice of developing a theme by which to “mark” each year. It has helped me center my thoughts and actions around a single virtue and strengthen it throughout the year. In the past, I’ve chosen themes such as grace, acceptance, and gentleness. This year, the season of Advent inspired me for my 2025 theme.

During a sermon, my pastor quoted the famous theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was born in 1906 and became a strong antagonist against the Nazi regime. He was arrested in April 1943 for his opposition to Hitler. Bonhoeffer was hanged in April 1945, only weeks before the end of World War 2. In a letter to his fiancée before his death, he wrote:

“Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.”

Bonhoeffer reminds us of the heart of Advent. We wait in anticipation of the Savior’s arrival, which symbolizes hope, joy, and the eventual day in which sin and darkness will be no more. Advent is marked by waiting. Yet, waiting bleeds out from the season of Advent to our everyday lives. We find ourselves waiting for jobs, people, relationships, change. In life, we have to wait for so many things. To do that well, we need patience. 

Joyce Meyer says, “Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it’s how we behave while we are waiting.” Thus, to embody patience, we need abundant humility. This ties in with my previous theme of acceptance. Acceptance doesn't mean you particularly like your circumstances; it means you surrender your expectations of them. It takes patience and humility not to allow negative reactions or behaviors to flow from our unmet expectations.

An article written by Thomas Barbain, Ph.D. in the Columbia Metropolitan offers a fascinating insight into patience:

“Patience is a virtue! Or, at least that is how the saying goes. But is it really? Patience is defined as “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset,” a definition with several important components. Patience is also a skill. We can work on increasing our ability to be patient and engage in practices to become a more patient person.”1

For much of my life, I thought of patience as a virtue. To some extent, I suppose it is. However, I never considered it as a skill. Patience involves a capacity to demonstrate certain behaviors in undesirable circumstances. Thus, it isn’t simply a virtue we either have or don’t, but a daily challenge we can all accept.

To achieve patience, I think we need some level of stillness, like water that is so still it reflects an image on its surface. When we are impatient, what we lack is stillness. We feel a rush of emotions and often react without providing space to process our feelings and let them pass. Perhaps if we find patience and stillness, we can better reflect the image of God.

I invite you on my journey through this next year of patience: patience for people, circumstances, and ourselves. Perhaps we can accept what is with humility and wait for what is not yet with patience.

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Photocred: Wikimedia Commons