Happy New Year
Well, 2025, what a year you were.
You began with processing my father’s death & a sense of injustice & disappointment from 2024.
You moved into jumping through hoops & plodding on, eyes forward.
2 May brought the sudden death of Jeff, a dear friend and host of the Wednesday afternoon pals - huna mewn hedd. The day of his funeral, my birthday, brought the death of someone who had been a father figure since 2003, through my no-contact period with my parents, John Ferris.
June brought quite the challenge and then good news and a decision to make, though the joy was muted.
August brought a new beginning, new friends, and the autumn a swirl of activity of settling into work and study, and a sense of being right where I was meant to be.
My mother had a stroke on 2 November, so the end of the year was in a state of readiness to go, though she was stable, so there was a...settled unease until the evening of Monday, 15 December, when my brother rang to tell me she had declined sharply on Saturday. I flew Wednesday morning, only to discover, right after getting through pre-clearance at Dublin, that she had died and hopefully, returned home to shelter under His wings.
The time home, short as it was, was incredibly blessed and I could feel G-d’s hand over it every step of the way.
I arrived home on Christmas Eve, ready to serve and read on Christmas morning & have an amazing Christmas dinner with Hazel, Phil, and the boys, and finally, stillness.
And that’s just me - the world has been on fire this year as the structures we have built show their rotten foundations and it becomes clear we must go another way.
There was a time I might have said ‘2025 can go in the bin’, but I’m less sure of those words than I once was. What I wouldn’t give for one more discussion of a Welsh drama with Jeff or an argument with John.
Time, even when it is at its most challenging, is precious. Joy doesn’t sit on enforced & relentless positivity and growth, but on reality - and I am going to snag this quote of Reverend Lucy Winkett from Sanjee, because it is perfect. This is the joy we must enter into, and what 2025 has broken in me allows the Holy Spirit to move in me to shape me to be whom I must become in 2026 and beyond.
And so, waiting for Big Ben to strike and the London fireworks with a glass of port in front of me, I wish you all a joyous, blessed New Year that finds your arms open to receive all it brings, knowing you’ll get by with a lot of love - and not a little help from your friends.
Love you.
...Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
