HAPPY NEW YEAR 🥳❤️ I hope your Christmas was so wonderful!!

I wonder what you’re like when it comes to welcoming in a new year? Are you someone who is full of expectant excitement at the possibilities of what this year could hold? Or are you someone who feels a little more neutral, or maybe even a bit wary as we enter into a new year, imagining that everything will simply repeat the same as before and therefore doesn’t feel very exciting at all?

However you feel at the beginning of this, or any, new year or new season, I would love to take a wee minute to suggest a way that we could choose to engage in this moment ❤️ In Scripture, we see a number of times when God speaks to His people about how to mark occasions that have passed so they can shape their futures. God loves a party 🥳 But His celebrations aren’t ever just for the sake of it. God’s celebrations really mean something important!!

In the Scriptures God gave His people, the children of Israel, 7 different annual and one weekly occasion when they were to stop, remember, and celebrate or commemorate. The goal of these moments was not just about the celebration of what had been; these moments allowed them to reset what they were focusing on so that they could keep moving in the right direction. And what God wants His people to reset their hearts on is HIM! He wants them to make sure their minds and hearts are focused on who He is and to remember who it is that they worship, so that they know that their God is bigger than anything they might face moving forward! And at the same time as remembering who their God was, they would remember who they were. Because they worshiped the only true God who had brought them out of slavery and into freedom, they had the right to live free lives. There was nothing that could hold them prisoner; they were His children, and His children were free 🙌

I know that we live in a different time and circumstance today, but the same truth still applies to our lives! If we worship Jesus, I believe it is important for us to stop and take time to celebrate! And in our celebrations, we remember who our God is! And because of Him, we can know that we are free ❤️🙌 Just like the Israelites in Bible times, when we walk with God, there is nothing that we face that is bigger than Him, and so we don’t need to be afraid of anything!! We are God’s children, and God’s children are free!!

As we remember who our God is, there is nothing we face that can hold us prisoner – whether fears, sickness, our thoughts, our circumstances… there is nothing greater than our God! We might face those things, but because we live in Him, we are free 🙌🥳 And so, at the beginning of 2026, I would love to remind us all that if we worship Jesus, then we can celebrate knowing who our God is, and we can remember that because of Him we get to live this year walking in His freedom 🥳