The Surprise Story of 2025

The calendar pages have turned, and I’m still here, criss-cross applesauce on the living room floor, surprised by delight. Days, weeks, months… an entire season has passed as I’ve watched bright summer-green leaves turn blazing school-bus yellow before falling right outside the window three feet away. But I’m here, still, stunned on a nightly basis.

Every evening, after I slip into cozy pajamas and twist my hair into a bun, I plop on the floor and reach for a paintbrush.

Music plays to my left, a candle flickers to my right, but my attention rests on the canvas atop the coffee table – a paint-by-number that is slowly becoming what it was meant to be all along.

Apricot sits beside pewter, soft pink slips between marigold and mauve, and what once appeared empty is now bursting with life.

For a long time, much longer than I expected, it was far from pretty. Every centimeter of the canvas has a corresponding number for a specific paint color, and for several weeks, it looked like one big mess. I’d carefully look over every inch, my eyes slowly scanning for any space calling for a particular number, and then I’d fill in the jagged lines before finding the next assigned spot. Eventually, dozens of oddly shaped dark blue spaces were scattered across the canvas with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

Hundreds of small shapes stared up at me, the outlines pressed up against one another like pieces of a puzzle, and with paint and patience, I knew it would eventually become something more.

I didn’t know it would tell a story.

Somewhere around the seventh color, it began to whisper. By the eleventh, it started to sing, to shout, to stun me speechless. Slowly, stroke after stroke, the canvas came to life, color exploding even as it stayed within the bounds.

What seemed random at the start was right all along.

What made no sense in the middle slowly shifted into something beautiful.

What I couldn’t imagine at the beginning became the reality staring back at me: hundreds of strangely shaped, carefully painted pieces turned into a sunrise.

It’s abstract, but it’s also intentional. The mess wasn’t a mistake.

If you look closely, you’ll see a splash of bright pink right next to hunter green, lemon chiffon yellow beside cerulean blue. But that’s just another way of saying if you look carefully, you’ll find a story.

Here at the end of the year, as I settle into my spot on the floor, paintbrush in hand and winter outside the window, the canvas itself is taking a new shape.

The painting I see in front of me, the canvas that is nearly complete, is becoming a visual for what I don’t see – yet – in the painting of my life, the story of my days. It’s a promise for all the pieces that still don’t make sense, a reminder to remember that what looks far from pretty and what feels broken or jagged right now is part of a bigger, fuller picture. This year is a swish on the canvas, a chapter in the story, a piece of the puzzle, and it’s okay if we can’t make sense of it all yet, if we hoped for a different color and we’re still waiting. It’s okay if it’s all one big mess, if we’re watching seasons pass but daring to still sit here anyway, painting in faith.

I’m not sure what 2025 held for you, the storylines you’ve lived, the loves you’ve lost, or the dreams that came true. If I had to guess, there are moments of highlighter yellow joy and shocks of electric blue, sweet lilac memories that soothe and pain like a deep burgundy that soaks all the way through.

Maybe 2025 felt like one endlessly long game of whack-a-mole, problems popping up left and right with no end in sight.

Maybe 2025 left you heartbroken and confused, the future now a shape you didn’t expect.

Maybe 2025 brought long-awaited answered prayers, miracles beyond what you could have imagined.

Maybe 2025 looked like nothing particularly remarkable, just a long string of ordinary days.

Maybe, when you look back on the year, it’s a little bit of all of it.

I don’t know what colors you’d give 2025, the shape it took, or the memories that will come to mind as the year comes to a close.

I won’t cover the canvas of your year with a cliché, I won’t say that everything that feels like a mess is actually a masterpiece if you just zoom out far enough.

But maybe it’s a sunrise.

An abstract, delightfully unexpected sunrise made of hurts and hopes and hues blending together to become what it was always meant to be – a true and beautiful and good story.

Whatever 2025 held and whatever 2026 brings, may the changing of the calendar page be a reminder that God is still at work. The proof is in the manger:

The Artist of it all, the Author of our days, is great at the long game.

Morning is already on the way.

“The Lord’s unfailing love and mercy still continue,
Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.”
Lamentations 3:22-23 GNT