A woman I see every blue moon shared with me at a party that her daughter, whose name I had taped to my fridge in exchange for my kids’ names on hers, phoned after a five-year estrangement to say she had returned to the Lord. When I told my husband the news, he said, “Imagine if she had given up praying for her daughter just a day before the phone call came.”

You are invited to an event featuring exotic coffees and spiced ciders, and you avidly go.

Upon arrival you find a large and festive room, every wall covered with photos of coffees, teas, and fruit nectars. As at a museum, you mosey slowly past each one in studious attention: here a lavender French Perle Groove mug, there a clay hand-warmer mug from Oregon, a few steps further a Pfaltzgraff Winterberry glass, turning the corner a pair of Waterford Crystal Irish coffee glasses.

The Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563, poses a good question to contemplate as 2019 heads toward history: “What is your only comfort in life and death?”

Last month, aboard a ship steaming from Casablanca, Morocco, to Dakar, Senegal, I read two thought-provoking novels featuring West African protagonists who found no comfort. 

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That was my introduction to motivational slogans, at the age of 19. It was a revelation: Hey! Whatever bad habits I’ve collected, whatever sins I’d slipped into, there was always a tomorrow. There was always a new start, a new resolution, a new opportunity to rise up from the ashes of defeat. Gotta learn how to fall before you learn to fly, right? Every journey begins with a single step. You never fail until you stop trying! The best way to get something done is to begin. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

While I visited my parents over Thanksgiving, they played an audio recording that I had never heard before. The hourlong recording was a collection of some of the most momentous times in their life: their wedding ceremony, my cries as a newborn, my first words, my younger brother’s early mumbling as a baby, and me as a toddler, speaking in sentences, singing, and dancing. 

Our house of four is down to three with the death of my father-in-law on Nov. 18. He was an old man, full of years, and ready to meet the Lord he had served all his life. Death was just a doorway—on our side of it, a bed in a tiny upstairs room with lotions and oral care sponge swabs on the nightstand; on the other side of it, “innumerable angels in festal gathering” and “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:22-23) and the face of God:

“As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness” (Psalm 17:15).

I first met Keanakay Scott this past January at a transitional housing shelter in Los Angeles. At the time, she had just scored a two-bedroom apartment in South Central LA through Section 8, a program that subsidizes housing for low-income tenants. She was giddy with excitement: “It’s weird! I haven’t had my own place in ... in ... in forever!”