With the first month of 2021 drawing to a close, many of us are daring to look forward. While it can be helpful to envision our life in a post-pandemic world, I am a firm believer that we cannot solely look forward without also looking back. As Pastor Kevin said last Sunday, “Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.”

When my computer, iPhone, iPad, or iAnything starts having a mind of its own, I push buttons, check my settings, complain out loud and then listen as anyone who is in earshot says to me, “Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on again?” Reset is magic. I don’t know why it works. I don’t know how it works. I’m just so glad that it does work! I see, in a way clearer than any other time in my life, that God is doing just that. Turning things off in order to turn them back on again with a fresh start and lessons learned.

When I ask my oldest two children what kind of job they think they might enjoy when they get older, I get very different answers. My 5-year-old tells me that he wants to be an inventor of time and space traveling portals. My 4-year-old wants to drive a green cement truck (and wants his brother - the future inventor - to sit next to him). It’s one of the most common questions we ask children - “what do you want to be when you grow up?” - because it reveals something about how they think about themselves and the world. We know they aren’t trying to predict the future, but their answers give us indicators about what they hope to experience (and who they want to experience it with), with the purity of childhood innocence and imagination.

What did you lose in 2020? A loved one to COVID? Your health (hopefully temporarily) to COVID? Your children’s education (to some degree)? Your job? Your faith in our country’s leadership (or in friends whom you discovered did not share your political views)? Your sense of safety (whether it was to leave your home because of the virus or because of unrest in our city)? If you didn’t “lose” something, surely you felt the impact of “all the things 2020,” because, let’s face it, a global pandemic – coupled with the shutdown of daily life, coupled with a hostile presidential election year, coupled with searing racial tension – impacted all of us in some significant way.

During the past few months, my daughter has been assessed for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). As a therapist (I know, right? Shouldn’t I have been able to fix this, foresee this, do something about this?), my head and heart have been challenged by some of the very fears I have attempted to assuage in clients.