The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is one of my favorite weeks of the whole year. Work is usually delightfully slow. School is on pause for our guys. My husband takes the week off. It’s a blissful few days of limited plans, board games, watching movies, reading and rest.

I LOVE IT.

It’s usually during this week that I come up with my “one word” for the upcoming year. As I’ve done in years past, I spent some time pondering and praying, searching for just the right word for 2021. But nothing really came to mind, so I figured there wouldn’t be one this time. And that’s ok. Some years are like that.

But God, knowing what I need and when I need it, unexpectedly slipped a word into my noggin late in the game on New Year’s Eve night. I was driving home from picking up our supper, lamenting with him about the past year. The many losses. The heartbreaking changes. I was telling him how unsteady the ground felt in my life this past year. How lost I felt in some ways. How in several areas of my life I felt like a stranger in a very strange land.

And as I drove, a thought popped into my head — a small whisper in my spirit asked, “Have you lost your confidence in me?”

Silenced by the question, I let that idea sink in for a minute. Have I lost my confidence in God? Surely not.

But as I let the miles slip by, I knew the question came because the answer was one I needed to deal with. I wanted to rationalize myself out of it, but I knew. Yes, my confidence in God — in who he is, in what he can do, in his sovereignty and wisdom — isn’t what it needs to be. It’s not that it has disappeared entirely. No, it’s just that I’ve spent too much time focused on my circumstances than on the one who rules over all of them. And that’s on me. I’m the one who changed, not him. I’m the one who took her eyes off the prize too many times.

There’s more I could say about all of this, but for now I’m content with starting here: my word for 2021 is CONFIDENCE.

And the verse I’m using as an anchor this year is Jeremiah 17:7: “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him.”

May 2021 be a year of reinforced confidence for me — and maybe for you, too — in the One who can be trusted above all and with all things.

Thank You, God, for being the same always and forever. For being the firm foundation upon which a life can be built. For waiting patiently when we wander and, when we go too far off the path, for coming to find us. You are the best God a creation could ever hope for. Amen.